"Falluja 101"
Rashid Khalidi, In These Times

“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster. Our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad but the responsibility, in this case, is not on the army which has acted only upon the request of the civil authorities.” — T.E. Lawrence, The London Sunday Times, August 1920

There is a small City on one of the bends of the Euphrates that sticks out into the great Syrian Desert. It’s on an ancient trade route linking the oasis towns of the Nejd province of what is today Saudi Arabia with the great cities of Aleppo and Mosul to the north. It also is on the desert highway between Baghdad and Amman. This city is a crossroads.

"Henri Lefebvre’s Youthfulness of Heart"
Andy Merrifield, The Brooklyn Rail


I never met Henri Lefebvre, the French Marxist philosopher, nor saw him lecture. Some of my friends who did said he was a real knockout. Others who had contact with him recall his warm, slow, melodious voice, his boyish passions, his virility—even in old age—and the posse of young, attractive women invariably in his train. Portraits cast him as a Rabelaisian monk and Kierkegaardian seducer all rolled into one. I’m sorry I missed this act, missed the man himself, en direct, live. But I did see him on British TV once, back in the early 1990s. The series, “The Spirit of Freedom,” was strictly for insomniacs and appeared in the wee hours. Each of the four programs tried to assess the legacy of Left French intellectuals during the twentieth-century. The cynical tone throughout wasn’t too surprising given that its narrator and brainchild was Bernard-Henri Lévy—BHL, as the French media know him—Paris-Match’s answer to Jean-Paul Sartre. The night I watched, an old white-haired man sat in front of the camera, dressed in a blue denim work shirt and rumpled brown tweed jacket. In his ninetieth-year, it was obvious to viewers Lefebvre hadn’t long left to live. Even Lévy described his interviewee as “tired that afternoon. His face was pallid, his eyes blood-shot. I felt he was overwhelmed from the start and clearly bored at having to answer my questions…I’d come hoping he would play a certain role, and this he did with a show of goodwill I hadn’t expected. I have to admit he also did it with elegance and talent.”