Americans in Parisby Charles Glass 
Americans in Paris tells for the first time the true story of the thousands of Americans who stayed in Paris during the Nazi occupation. This tale of adventure, intrigue, passion and deceit exposes the lives of Americans caught up in war from the day the German army marched into Paris in June 1944 and took many of them into the Paris underground, the Maquis and the concentration camps. Order a copy through Amazon.com, Harper Collins or Penguin USA
The Northern Frontby Charles Glass 
The Northern Front is an eyewitness account of the Iraqi opposition's preparations for the American invasion, the Kurdish planning in northern Iraq and the early stages of the war when some of the opposition moved to the south. Order a copy through Al Saqi Books
The Tribes Triumphantby Charles Glass 
The Tribes Triumphant completes the story of Charles Glass' earlier Middle East adventure, Tribes With Flags, after his kidnapping by Hizballah in Lebanon.
Get your copy through: Amazon (UK)
Tribes With Flagsby Charles Glass 
Get your copy through: Amazon (UK)Amazon (US)
Money For Old Ropeby Charles Glass 
Get your copy through: Amazon (UK)Amazon (US)
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afghanistan
They eat pizza now in Kabul but the war is far from over
The National 10 Dec 11
During Lebanon's 15-year civil war, unreconstructed optimists believed that life was always returning to normal. Their proof was that restaurants and cafes were open....
Slowly We Turn
Taki's Magazine 27 Jun 11
Obama is pulling American troops out of Afghanistan. Or at least he says he is. He also said that American forces in Iraq are no longer there. Officially, the Iraq war is over, at least if you ignore the fighting. So where are the 45,000 soldiers based in Iraq if not in, well, Iraq?...
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american empire
Obama: Transparently Opaque
Taki's Magazine 19 Jun 11
What's going on with Barack "Open Government" Obama? His Justice Department has prosecuted more people for exposing government secrets than all the presidents from George "I cannot tell a lie" Washington to George "I cannot tell the truth" Bush combined. Compared to his predecessors' three prosecutions in more than two centuries, Obama has added five in less than two-and-a-half years....
An Expat Named Superman
Taki's Magazine 09 May 11
There were two huge stories last week in American mythmaking: The United States has slain Public Enemy Number One, and Superman is renouncing his American citizenship. Barack Obama may exult in the first, but he should beware the second. The Man of Steel's renunciation of his adopted homeland may represent more in American mythology than the extrajudicial execution of a...
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britain
Reading, Writing, and Rupert
Taki's Magazine 12 Jun 11
The Briterati, as I call Britain's media pontificators on matters spiritual and temporal, are in a spin over reports that parents no longer read to their children and that the state is failing to protect the wee 'uns from pornography. It is good to drop in on Britain from time to time, if only to observe moral guardians' ephemeral preoccupations...
Britain can never atone for its colonial past
The National 09 Apr 11
David Cameron spoke with unusual candour for a British prime minister a few days ago when he told university students in Islamabad: "I don't want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world's problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place." He was speaking of Kashmir, but he...
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india/pakistan
Britain can never atone for its colonial past
The National 09 Apr 11
David Cameron spoke with unusual candour for a British prime minister a few days ago when he told university students in Islamabad: "I don't want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world's problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place." He was speaking of Kashmir, but he...
The Drifting Capital of Terror
Taki's Magazine 14 Nov 10
The printer cartridge bombs which nearly blew up U.S.-bound commercial jets have turned Sana'a, Yemen, into the new world terror capital. Terror, which the United States treats as if it were a state, has had many capitals and will undoubtedly have many more in this seemingly perpetual battle against evil. Right before September 11, 2001, terrorism's capital was Kabul. Since...
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iran
Let it Leak: Wikileaks and Patriotic Whistle-Blowing
Taki's Magazine. 25 Oct 10
Spare a kind thought for my old friend Michael Morrell's oldest son, Geoff, the Pentagon's Press Secretary. The Defense Department has tasked poor Geoff with providing its public reaction to Julian Assange's Wikileaks disclosure on Saturday of 391,832 documents relating to America's war in Iraq. The new flood of "Pentagon Papers"-style documents detail a pattern of US soldiers murdering civilians...
Who Killed Kurdish Journalist Sardasht Osman?
Taki's Magazine 16 Aug 10
This is no time to be a journalist, especially if you happen to be a Kurd. Under assault from Turkey and Iran, Kurdish journalists are imprisoned, tortured and intimidated. An Iranian revolutionary court sentenced one Kurdish journalist, Adnan Hassanpour, to death last year for alleged espionage. The death penalty was also passed on his cousin, Abdolwahed Batimer, head of the...
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iraq
War: Still a Racket
Taki's Magazine 18 Apr 11
Barack Obama campaigned for president on a promise to end the war in Iraq and "finish the job against al Qaeda in Afghanistan." More than two years after he took the oath of office, American forces remain in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead of eliminating two wars, he has lunged into a third in Libya. How is it that a nation...
Britain can never atone for its colonial past
The National 09 Apr 11
David Cameron spoke with unusual candour for a British prime minister a few days ago when he told university students in Islamabad: "I don't want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world's problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place." He was speaking of Kashmir, but he...
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israel/palestine
A revolution in 1972 where Palestinians first lost their way
The National 23 Sep 11
Despite what you read, this year's Arab Spring is not the first Arab revolution of the modern era. There have been many. The first were against colonial occupation. French cannon and aircraft levelled one quarter of Damascus in 1925, inflicting more destruction than Bashar Al Assad's current assaults on Deraa, Idlib, Homs and Hama. Britain bombed Kurds and Arabs in...
The Two-State Solution
Taki's Magazine 19 Jul 11
Try to see it from the other guy's point of view. He may be wrong. He may be, at least partly, right. Today, I am trying hard to see life from the point of view of an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank. I have known a few, including one named Benzion Gruber, whom I liked. Benzi Gruber was...
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journalism
Hitch never pulled his punches
The Spectator 16 Dec 11
One night in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, circa 1979 or 1980, Christopher Hitchens was walking home from dinner at our house when he saw a man beating up a woman. Never one to back away from battle, physical or verbal, Christopher took a swing at the woman's attacker. He was pleased to have spared her further savagery from the brute, until...
Another Dead Journalist
Taki's Magazine 11 Jul 11
The first email came on May 31 from London's Pluto Press, saying that one of their authors was missing and believed to be imprisoned. The author was forty-year-old journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, whose reporting on Pakistan and Afghanistan was famously reliable and probing. As editor of Asia Despatch and Pakistan Bureau Chief of Hong Kong's Asia Times Online, he had...
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lebanon
Time for truth, and painful reconciliation in Lebanon
The National 16 Aug 11
Lebanon survived 15 years of civil war. It endured military occupation by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (forced on it by Egypt and Syria), by Syria (at the request of Lebanon's president and with the approval of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger) and by Israel (blessed by then-President Ronald Regan)....
For Lebanon, the truth is a poisoned chalice
The National 02 Jul 11
When the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated on February 14, 2005, at least one million citizens massed in the centre of Beirut to demand al haqiqa, the truth. For the previous 20 years, Lebanese of all backgrounds had been killed with impunity. They included the Druze chieftain Kamal Jumblatt, the Maronite president-elect Bashir Gemayel and the Hizbollah...
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libya
Not Over Yet
The London Review of Books 25 Aug 11
The Libyans are lucky that Muammar Gaddafi did not hold out longer. If he had, there might not be much of the country left. Nato long since ran out of military targets, and it had to hit something to get the ragtag rebels into the royal palace before they ended up shooting one another. 'At present Nato is not attacking...
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middle east - general
Prison for denying genocide, prison for saying it took place
The National 28 Jan 12
The Armenian village of Kassab, amid the apple orchards of northern Syria, boasts three churches. Each serves a branch of the Christianity practised there, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. The Protestant church, understandably, is the least ornate, lacking the Catholics' rococo angels and the gold-leaf icons of the Orthodox. When I visited in 1986, I was struck by a simple painting...
Winds of change blow, and the Arab League flaps about
The National 10 Nov 11
The Arab League's latest sessions on Syria bring to mind the first Arab League summit I witnessed, in November 1973. Meeting in Algiers barely two months after a coup had overthrown the elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, league officials corralled the press corps in a football stadium, sparking comparisons with events in the Estadio Nacional in Santiago, where General...
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miscellaneous
We older fathers make a better go of parenting
The Evening Standard 13 Oct 11
We have just christened my new son, Lucien, at Saint Etheldreda's in the City. It's the same church where Fr Kit Cunningham baptised my other children. Lucien's baptism, however, comes 26 years after we baptised my last offspring, his sister Julia. I was 34. I'm 60 now....
Russia retires the Kalashnikov, but the killing won't stop
The National 01 Oct 11
The Russian army's decision to replace the famed Kalashnikov as its standard infantry assault weapon is so shocking that its 92-year-old inventor, Lieutenant General Mikhail Kalashnikov, cannot be told. The defence ministry fears the news might kill him. If it did, he would be only the latest casualty of a rifle that has killed millions since it went into production...
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north america
Obama: The Great Self-Compromiser
Taki's Magazine 10 Aug 11
I should have sent President Obama a present for his fiftieth birthday last week, but I didn't. A lot of things should be but aren't. Obama should have been an ideal chief of state to reverse the previous twenty years' self-destructive policies, but he wasn't. He should have kept a few promises - not to the banks and military contractors,...
Lame Horses and Crooked Jockeys: The Republican Nomination Derby
Taki's Magazine 06 Jun 11
Mitt Romney declared his intention last week to seek the Republican Party's nomination for president in 2012. Between now and next summer's convention, he'll trip along the Yellow Brick Road that he must imagine will lead him to the White House. That means fifteen months of making promises no one expects him to keep, chomping on fried chicken in Alabama...
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reviews
The original special relationship
The Spectator 03 Dec 11
Review of The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris David McCullogh Simon & Schuster, 560pp, £25 Of all the cities in all the world, Paris dominates the American imagination more than any other. Although Americans may admire Rome or London, more have enjoyed a love affair with the French capital since Benjamin Franklin represented the 13 rebellious colonies at the court...
Time for Outrage!
The Nation 16 Feb 11
Toward the end of 2010, a small book by a 93-year-old man unexpectedly reached the summit of the bestseller list in France. Indignez-vous! by Stéphane Hessel sold more than 600,000 copies between October and the end of December, propelling it above Prix Goncourt-winner Michel Houellebecq's novel La carte et le territoire by several hundred thousand copies. Hessel had written other...
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september 11
Thank God for Koran Burnings
Taki's Magazine 13 Sep 10
No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. -H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy, 1948...
Squaring the circle
The New Statesman 15 Jan 09
"The war between George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden defeated both of its protagonists," says Gilles Kepel in his provocative study of the war on terror and the Middle East. But there's too much else to lose for America or the jihadis to withdraw from the conflict. Review of Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: the Future of the Middle East...
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spain
Fleeing the Horns
Saga Magazine, London, October 2003 01 Oct 03
'Won't it be splendid,' Brett said. 'Spain! We will have fun.' - Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises It was my idea. It's been my idea for about 35 years. I like to think that, deep down, it is everyone's idea. If it hadn't been for Hemingway, I wonder if many foreigners would attend a bullfight festival held in...
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syria
History has not been kind to Syria's desire for change
The National 16 Dec 11
A dog in Lebanon, an old joke goes, was so hungry, mangy and tired of civil war that he escaped to Syria. To the surprise of the other dogs, he returned a few months later. Seeing him better groomed and fatter than before, they asked whether the Syrians had been good to him. "Very good." "Did they feed and wash...
US interference in Syria could bring about another Iraq
The Evening Standard 15 Dec 11
The withdrawal of most United States forces from Iraq this week is anything but the end of American military involvement in the Middle East. The latest focus of Washington's attention is Syria, where the United Nations says 5,000 people have been killed since the uprising erupted in March....
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the balkans
Lewis of Arabia
The Nation 13 Sep 04
Review of From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East by Bernard Lewis. I have witnessed what Bernard Lewis, and later Samuel Huntington, designated the "clash of civilizations" between Christendom and Islam up close in at least two wars. One was the Lebanese civil war that erupted in the spring of 1975, pitting universal values and tolerance against sectarianism and...
Letter from London
Znet 02 Apr 99
The war against Slobodan Milosevic was clearly lost when the London papers ran a front-page photograph of Defence Secretary George Robertson in Italy aboard a warplane. This isn't a war, it's a photo op for politicians who have never seen battle. With friends like British prime minister Tony Blair and his comic book hero, Bill Clinton, Kosovo's Albanians will be...
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travel
Back to the old hacienda
The Independent 25 Jun 05
Something bit me. In fact, lots of things were gnawing at me. Their chewing progressed up my leg to my back and face - and no, I wasn't dreaming. I leapt out of bed, grabbed a torch and surveyed the sheets. A column of ants was marching under the front door, over my bed and out into the garden. The...
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