Dispatches

NRO has published another excerpt from my forthcoming book, Where the West Ends. This one is darker and more serious than the last one I published here. It takes place in Georgia during the Russian invasion.

Getting into Georgia on the train was easier than getting out. As soon as the Georgian customs officials stamped my passport and finished hand-searching my luggage, I stepped off and into a taxi. A friend warned me in advance that while the train sits at the border between Georgia and Azerbaijan for hours, an inexpensive taxi ride would get me to the capital in less than 45 minutes. So I took his advice and arrived in Tbilisi long before any of my fellow passengers.

The taxi ride was my introduction to Georgia, and it wasn’t pretty. Azerbaijan’s countryside beyond its booming capital, Baku, reminded me of Iraq in some ways with its bad roads, walled-off houses, general poverty, and vaguely Middle Eastern characteristics. But the part of Georgia my taxi drove through was considerably rougher and poorer. It looked brutally Stalinist.

Hideous smokestacks made up the skyline. Nothing new had been built in decades. Homes were falling apart. Monstrous public-housing blocks desperately needed paint, new windows, and general repairs. Many of the factories were shuttered. Very little economic activity was evident. It was as though the area was still operating under a command economy even though it was not.

More than half the cars on the road were banged-up Russian-built Ladas. Nearly all had cracked windshields, including the taxi I rode in. These Ladas are tiny. They have tiny doors, tiny steering wheels, tiny dashboards, tiny seats, and no seat belts. A Lada is the last car you’d want to crash in.

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Where the West Ends.

*

“An adventure,” the great travel writer Tim Cahill once wrote, “is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.” I have never taken a trip that more aptly fits that description than when my best friend Sean LaFreniere and I drove to Iraq on a whim.

It was stupid of us and the trip was unrelentingly miserable, though in my defense the idea was not solely mine. Sean was my accomplice and we suffered together.

I lived in Beirut at the time. He lived in Copenhagen, where he was studying for his Master’s in architecture. I invited him to Beirut, but he said he would rather see Turkey, so instead we met in Istanbul. Neither of us had any idea that we would end up driving all the way to Iraq. Why would we? Hardly any tourists visiting Turkey even think of it. Istanbul is one of the world’s greatest cities while Iraq is—well, it’s Iraq.

Sean’s plane was a day late due to an airline snafu, and he arrived exhausted and grumpy. “I need a drink,” he said. “Is it even possible to get a drink in this country?”

“This is Turkey!” I said. “You can get a drink in even the smallest mountain village in Anatolia.” He knew that already, but he was tired and had forgotten. I had been to only one Muslim country that bans alcohol, and that was Libya. It’s available most other places.

“Come on, Sean,” I said. “Let’s get you a drink.”

We washed down bloody steaks with smoky red wine in a brick and stone building that was older than our own country while a man in a tuxedo masterfully played the violin. I dearly wished I could have been there with my wife. The restaurant’s atmosphere was achingly romantic and I hadn’t seen her for months. Sean missed his wife, too. Angie, like my wife Shelly, was back in the United States.

But Sean and I had a man’s trip ahead of us. He and I both love hitting the open road in a car, especially in foreign countries. It is not our wives’ style. When he and I are in the mood for a road trip, we go alone.

I let Sean decide the itinerary since I’d been to Turkey before and he hadn’t. The city of Izmir on the Aegean coast is spectacular, but we only had three days before he had to return for exams and I had to catch a flight to Tel Aviv. So the plan was to visit Gallipoli and Troy which were much closer.

We hurtled down the highway from Istanbul toward Gallipoli. That road heads west in the direction of Greece and Sicily. On the way we argued about whether Turkey was Eastern or Western. In the twenty-four hours since he had arrived, he decided it was mostly Western. I played Devil’s Advocate and said it was Eastern, though what I really think is that it’s neither and both.

Many visitors to Istanbul are surprised that, aside from the mosques on the skyline, it looks much more European than Middle Eastern. They shouldn’t be. Although part of the city is on the Asian side of the Bosphorus strait, most of it is in Europe. It was the eastern capital of the Roman Empire and endured as such for centuries after the western half, with Rome as its capital, first declined and then fell. It was not until 1453 that the city, then named Constantinople and the capital of the Byzantine Empire, was conquered by Turkish Ottomans out of Asia. The Ottoman Empire then ruled over most of the Middle East and much of Europe’s Balkan Peninsula for hundreds of years. The empire was Islamic and ruled by a caliphate, but it was also, simultaneously, trans-civilizational.

Many Europeans in Bosnia and Albania converted to Islam during this time, but the Turks couldn’t resist becoming a little Westernized by incorporating Europeans into their realm. Turkey is thoroughly Western compared with its cousin Turkmenistan, which isn’t at all. The same phenomenon partly explains why Russia today has Eastern aspects to its culture due to its conquering of lands in the Far East and why Mexico and Peru are culturally part Aztec and Incan despite being the former colonies of Western imperial Spain.

“Be careful out there!” Sean’s Danish friends said, as though Turkey were teeming with Islamist fanatics who wanted to kill him. “Isn’t it dangerous?” one of his professors said. “Don’t let anyone know you’re American or living in Denmark!” Little did this educated man know, Istanbul is safer than Copenhagen.

Danes were right to be a little concerned, though. The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten had recently published a batch of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that Muslims all over the world considered “blasphemous.” Frenzied mobs sponsored by the Syrian government set Denmark’s embassies in Beirut and Damascus on fire. One hundred and thirty nine people, almost all of them Muslims, were killed during various protests worldwide.

Istanbul looked and felt more Western than Sean expected. It felt Western to me, too, since I had just arrived from the Arab world. I was still in Devil’s Advocate mode, though, so it was my job to make the case for Turkey being Eastern.

“Remember,” I said. “This country borders Greece and Bulgaria. But it also borders Iraq.”

I could all but hear the gears turn in his head.

“That’s right,” he said and put his hand over his mouth. He knew he shouldn’t say what he was thinking, but he removed his hand and said it anyway. “Holy shit, we could drive to Iraq.”

The instant he said it I knew that we would, indeed, drive to Iraq. Who cares about Troy when we could drive to Iraq?

I have known Sean most of my life. I should have known, then, that it’s impossible for us to rent a car in a foreign country and only drive a few hours, that he and I would almost certainly end up more than a thousand miles and a whole world away from where we innocently planned to visit over the weekend. He is the only person I grew up with in Oregon, with the possible exception of my brother, Scott, who would see any appeal whatsoever in driving from a pleasant and heavily-touristed part of the world to one of the scariest countries on earth.

But Sean didn’t yet know what I knew. I had just flown over Turkey’s Anatolian core in an airplane on a clear day from Lebanon. All of Turkey east of the Bosphorus ripples with mountains. And when I say mountains, I mean mountains. Huge, steep, snow-covered monsters that rise from the earth and the sea like impassable walls. Turkey is a miniature continent unto itself. (Hence the name Asia Minor.) You can’t blow through that land in a car like you can if you stick to I-5 in California.

I wanted to do it, though. Badly. How many people have ever decided to spontaneously take a road trip to Iraq from Europe after they were already in the car and driving in the other direction? We were heading toward Greece, not the Tigris. We had no visas. No map. No plan. And no time. Sean had to be back in Copenhagen in three days for his exams. Pulling this off would be nearly impossible. Nothing appealed to me more.

I pulled off the road and stopped the car so I could think.

“We’re going to make this work,” I said.

*

Why go to Iraq? Because it is there, because it is different, and because no one else wants to. Because adventurous travel and unusual human experiences make our lives better. Istanbul is spectacular and Paris is even more so, but visiting a place like Iraq engages the senses and the mind on a much deeper level even if it is unpleasant. It’s not like going to another planet, exactly, but it’s new enough and strange enough that it makes me feel like a kid again when everything was hard and had to be learned. Iraq is so different from my native Oregon that almost everything about it is utterly fascinating. Istanbul is Eastern enough and exotic enough for it to be interesting for a short while, but at the same time it’s enough like the West I grew up in that it begins to feel mundanely familiar within a few days, if not hours. A sudden arrival in an utterly alien culture is as intoxicating as a narcotic.

I called my wife and told her what I was up to. I also called a friend of mine who worked for the Council of Ministers in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region just across the Turkish border. I had visited Iraqi Kurdistan just three months earlier as a journalist, so I knew some people. And I needed to know: would it be possible to get tourist visas on arrival at the border?

“Michael!” my Iraqi friend said, disappointed that I even asked. “You know the Kurds won’t give you any problems.”

Iraqi Kurds, unlike Iraqi Arabs, are some of the most pro-American people in the world.

“Sorry,” I said. “The border is more than a thousand miles away. I don’t want to drive all the way over there in winter unless I’m sure we can get in.”

“Of course you can get in,” he said. “You are always welcome in Kurdistan.”

“Can I call you from the border if we have any problems?” I said.

“Michael!” he said. “We will not give you any trouble. The only people who might give you trouble are Turks.”

I didn’t think the Turks would care if or how we left Turkey. They might care once we tried to come back, but Sean and I had multiple-entry visas.

It soon dawned on Sean that we were actually going to Iraq. (Even though we would be in the tranquil and friendly Kurdistan region as opposed to war-torn Fallujah.) We were no longer talking about it, but doing it.

“Would you take your wife there?” he said.

“Of course,” I said. “It’s really not dangerous. Shelly wished she could have gone with me when I went there before.”

Iraqi Kurds have never been at war with the United States. Nearly every man, woman, and child was relieved when Saddam Hussein’s regime was demolished. Their part of the country suffered no insurgency, no kidnappings, almost no crime, and even less terrorism.

It was a minor drag that Sean and I wouldn’t get to see much of Turkey except from the car. Gallipoli isn’t the most interesting place in the country, but it was the site of a crucial World War I battle and the inspiration for one of the most moving speeches of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder.

“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives,” he famously said of the buried British dead, “you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us, where they lie, side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.”

The only things we didn’t have that we needed were a decent map and a good night’s sleep.

We crossed the surging Dardanelles by rain-spattered ferry and landed on Turkey’s Asian shore in the charming town of Canakkale.

Gallipoli was just on the other side of the water. A monumental set piece downtown was made of big guns from the battle.

I asked the clerk at the hotel desk if he knew where I could buy a map.

He didn’t. I wasn’t surprised. Maps are generally harder to find in the Near and Middle East where a startling number of people don’t know how to read them.

“Do you have any idea what’s the best road to take to get to Turkish Kurdistan?” I said. Sean and I did have a map; it just wasn’t a good one. We couldn’t tell from the low granularity which route was best.

He didn’t answer the question. Instead he said, “I don’t like Kurds.”

“What’s wrong with Kurds?” Sean said.

“I don’t like their culture,” the clerk said and twisted his face. “They’re dirty and stupid.”

Sean and I just looked at him and blinked. He seemed like such a sweet kid when he checked us in.

I had a brief flashback to a conversation I had with a Kurd in Northern Iraq a few weeks earlier. “Istanbul is a great city,” my Kurdish friend said. “The only problem is it’s full of Turks.”

“What do you think of Arabs?” Sean said.

“Eh,” the clerk said. “We don’t like them in Turkey. We have the same religion, but that’s it. They cause so many problems. You know.”

Sometimes it seems like everyone in the Middle East hates everyone else in the Middle East. Arabs hate Kurds and Israelis. Turks hate Arabs and Kurds. Kurds hate Turks and fear Arabs. (Intriguingly, Kurds love Israelis.) Everyone hates Palestinians.

Not all people are haters. I know plenty who aren’t. But every culture has its baseline prejudices that individuals either opt into or out of. It’s exhausting. Sometimes I just want to shake people and say: Keep your old-world ethnic squabbling out of my face, willya please? Jesus, no wonder there’s so much war around here. Even so, Middle Easterners are the most friendly and charming people I’ve ever met.

Sean and I tried to go to sleep early so we could leave at first light. I stared at the ceiling and remembered my flight over the spectacularly mountainous country. We’re screwed, I thought. There’s no way we can drive across that landscape to Iraq and back in three days from where we are now.

And I was right.

*

Sean and I woke at dawn and headed south from Canakkale toward the ancient ruins of Troy. We wouldn’t have time to hang out there, though, or anywhere else for that matter, if we wanted to make it all the way to Iraq and back to Istanbul on time.

We weren’t in the car for a half-hour before we saw the turnoff.

“We have to stop,” Sean said.

“No time,” I said.

“It’s Troy!” Sean said. “We can’t just drive past it.”

I pulled off the road. Vicious dogs ran straight at the car. If I hadn’t slammed on the brakes I would have killed them. This happened over and over again while driving through Turkey.

We parked in the lot and paid twenty or so dollars to get in.

“Hurry,” I said to Sean. “Grab your camera and go.”

Somebody built a wooden yet somehow cartoon-looking “Trojan Horse” and stuck it directly outside what would have been the gate to the city had it not been reduced to rubble by time, neglect, and erosion. Sean ran toward it while I snapped a quick picture.

“Run,” he said.

We ran—literally, ran—through the entire ruined city in under ten minutes. It’s amazing how small the place is. This tiny little town, no bigger than a dinky modern-day village, left an imprint on history and literature completely out of proportion to its actual size. Too bad we had no time whatsoever to contemplate any of it.

We ran back to the car. I damn near killed the dogs again on the way back to the main road. Do they snarl and charge at everyone who drives past? It’s a wonder they’re still alive.

I unfurled a brand-new map we picked up from a tourist information office. It looked like the best bet was to drive down to the Aegean Coast toward Izmir, a city we initially deemed too far away from Istanbul to visit in time. We couldn’t possibly get all the way to Iraq and back in the two days we had left, but we kept going anyway. If by some miracle we could figure out how to get there on schedule, we’d have no time to do anything but have lunch and leave. We were driving 2,000 miles round-trip—to Iraq of all places—just to have lunch.

I drove us toward Izmir as fast as the coastal road would allow. The Aegean Sea sprawled out on the right. The view was extraordinary. Greece was on the other side of that water. I could see it. There were more islands between us and the Greek mainland than I could count on two hands. While beautiful, the view was also discouraging. Greece is a long way from Iraq. It’s more than a thousand road miles away. And yet there it was.

The way south toward Izmir was a nightmare of slow-moving traffic around tight bends in the road and through coastal resorts. Izmir was at most five percent of the way to Iraq from Istanbul. We had driven almost half a day and still hadn’t made it even that far. There was no way we could make it to Iraq in even a week at that speed.

“We need to head inland and get off this road,” I said.

“The mountains will kill us,” Sean said.

“The coast is killing us. We have to chance it.”

I turned off and headed toward the heart of Anatolia. At first the road was encouraging. Then we got stuck behind truckers doing 20 miles an hour.

“Told you this was a bad idea,” Sean said.

“The coast was a bad idea, too,” I said. “We’re pretty much screwed no matter what.”

We pressed on into hard driving rain, which slowed us down even more. I wanted to blow up the slow trucks ahead with a rocket launcher. Get out of the way, get out of the way, we’re making terrible time! Eventually the rain cleared, revealing a punishing road toward a gigantic mountainous wall.

“Oh my God!” Sean said. “We never should have turned inland.”

He was right. I screwed up, but it was too late.

“We’ll head back to the coast when we can,” I said.

We didn’t make it back to the coast until dark. This time we were on the Mediterranean. Rain washed over the road in broad sheets. In a third of our available time, almost no progress had been made at all toward Iraq.

*

We both woke up with a virus. My throat burned when I swallowed. My entire body, from the top of my head to the bottoms of my feet, was wracked with a terrible fever ache. We had so far to go and almost no time to do it. At least we were out of the punishing mountains.

But we were back on the punishing coast. A twisty little road hugged the shore which rose up so sheer from the Mediterranean it was impossible to drive more than 30 miles an hour without plunging shriekingly over a cliff.

“Now you see why I wanted to get off the coast!” I said.

Sean nodded silently. There was no way to win. You just can’t drive across Turkey in a normal amount of time unless you take the autobahn linking Istanbul and Ankara. We were so far from that road, though, that it was very near hopeless.

I tried to sleep in the passenger seat while Sean took the wheel. There would be no more stopping to sleep in hotels. We would have to drive straight for the rest of the trip.

Without time to stop at restaurants, we were forced to eat terrible food. We had soft drinks, potato chips, and other crap from convenience stores attached to gas stations that carried the same kind of salty, sugary snacks sold in similar stores in the United States.

Once we tried to pop into a little food stall at night. Then we saw what was being cooked on a stove: a nasty green-brown substance bubbling in an unspeakable cauldron. We both turned and walked right out the door.

“I can’t deal with that right now,” I said.

“It looks like Orc food,” Sean said.

In troglodyte country, where some people live in caves tunneled into the ground and the cliffs, an old man stood by the side of the road selling bananas.

“Want some bananas?” I said.

“Yes!” Sean said.

I pulled off the road.

“Quick, get those bananas,” I said.

Sean rolled down the window and handed the old man a dollar. In return we received a handful of bananas. Real food at last.

We passed through great-looking towns that I cannot tell you the names of. Turkey is packed with wonderful places that hardly anyone in the States ever hears about.

The virus was killing me.

“We need a pharmacy,” I said.

“No time to stop,” Sean said.

“If we’re going to drive all day and all night we can’t be feeling like this,” I said. “We’ll drive off the road and kill both of us.”

We stopped at a pharmacy and bought medicine.

We also stopped at an Internet café. Sean and I wouldn’t be able to take our rental car across the border into Iraq. If we wanted to make our way to the Iraqi city of Duhok, someone would have to pick us up. So I sent an email to one of my fixers and tried to hire him for the next day. I asked him to please send someone else to meet us if he couldn’t do it himself.

Sean and I got back in the car. A few hours later we could stop at another Internet café, check the email again, and continue to work on our Iraqi logistics. We didn’t yet know that there would be no more Internet cafés. We’d be flying blind from then on.

I felt amazingly irresponsible for trying to put together an Iraqi itinerary at the last second from the road while sick and with no time.

“If no one picks us up,” I said to Sean, “we’ll have to hitchhike or flag down a taxi.”

“Hitchhike in Iraq?” Sean said.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s the Kurds in Northern Iraq. They’re cool.”

Sean didn’t say anything. I knew how dubious what I suggested must have sounded.

“Are you okay with that?” I said. “Will you cross the border if no one is there to pick us up? We’ll figure something out. Trust me. Trust the Kurds. Trust the universe. We’ll be fine.”

“Alright,” Sean said and threw his hands in the air.

We continued the punishing drive along the coast, in the rain, malnourished, sleep-deprived, and wracked with a terrible illness. It was unspeakable.

“Holy shit, look at that!” Sean said as we drove past some hotels on the side of the road.

“What?” I said.

“A sea castle,” Sean said. “Wait, you’ll see it again in a second.”

I saw it when we cleared the bank of hotels.

“Holy shit!” I said and pulled off to the side of the road.

An otherworldly sea castle appeared to literally float off the coast of the Mediterranean. I had never even heard of this thing.

“Wow,” Sean said. “Look what they have! This country is just amazing.”

“Yep,” I said. “We need to come back here and visit it properly.”

“Let’s go, let’s go,” he said. “It’s getting dark.”

It was, indeed, getting dark. The cold medicine we bought at the pharmacy seemed to have no effect. We were both sick as dogs and had no time to stop at a hotel to sleep it off.

BANG. We got a flat tire. I pulled onto the shoulder.

“So much for Iraq,” Sean said.

“Wait,” I said. “We might have a spare.”

I popped the trunk. We did have a spare! It was a real spare, too, not a near-useless “donut” that can fall off at speeds faster than thirty miles an hour. The only problem was we had no jack.

Sean and I walked across the road and ducked into a store that sold yard tools. The owner did not speak a word of English. Darkness was falling. Sean drew a picture of a blown out tire on a pad of paper. The man indicated he didn’t sell tires. I grabbed the pad of paper and drew a picture of a car propped up on a jack.

The man called a friend of his who showed up on a motorcycle with a big bag of tools. Without saying a word or even looking at us he jacked up our car and changed the tire for us in two minutes. I handed our savior twenty dollars.

“Thank you so much!” I said. He rode away on his bike.

And then we were off. The whole flat tire incident only took half an hour. What incredible luck. We just might make it to Iraq after all.

*

We drove all night, taking turns at the wheel in the dark. I could tell when we finally left the Mediterranean and approached inland Turkish Kurdistan after the silhouettes of palm trees vanished and I could see semi-desert features at the edge of the headlight range. Most traffic slacked off by this point. Towns grew poorer and farther apart. Syria was only a few miles off to our right. Turkey didn’t look remotely like Europe any more. That much was obvious even in the dark. We were deep in the Middle East now.

“I can’t drive anymore,” Sean said. “You have to do it.”

I got behind the wheel and drove as far as I could until three o’clock in the morning.

“You have to drive now,” I said. “I’m going to go off the road if I drive any farther.”

“I can’t drive anymore,” Sean said.

I stopped the car and got out. My teeth instantly chattered. It was absolutely frigid outside. If we napped on the side of the road we would shake inside our coats. My entire body still throbbed with fever ache. I needed a bed.

“We can’t sleep now,” I said as I got back in the car. “You have no idea how cold it is here. We need to find a hotel.”

But we were in the absolute middle of nowhere. All I could see were rocks and scrub in the headlights.

I drove slowly so I would not kill us. We found a low-rent Turkish trucker motel. What looked like 900 trucks were outside.

“I’m stopping here,” I said.

“I don’t want to spend the night with a bunch of loud truckers,” Sean said. The parking lot was awfully noisy.

“There’s nothing else out here,” I said. “It’s either the truckers, the cold, or I kill us on the side of the road.”

We went into the trucker motel in the middle of the Turkish wasteland on the road to Iraq. It was exactly as grim inside as you would expect. A twitchy man on the night shift checked us into a room.

“Sozpas,” I said. Thank you, in Kurdish.

“Are you sure you’re speaking the right language?” Sean said. “Are we really in Kurdistan?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think so, but I’m not sure. Anyway, he did not seem offended.” He probably was, however, surprised. The Turkish government had only recently begun to relent in its draconian suppression of the Kurdish language.

It was four o’clock in the morning. We set our alarm clocks for six. Two hours later we woke. I felt exhausted and needed to sleep for a week. My eyes burned from the light. But I felt great at the same time. My fever had broken. And it was time to head into Iraq.

*

Sean and I dragged our sorry, exhausted, malnourished selves to the car at 6:30 in the morning just a few hours northwest of the Turkish-Iraqi border. For the first time we had a look at our new surroundings in daylight. 

Turkish Kurdistan is a disaster. It is emphatically not where you want to go on vacation.

One village after another had been blown to pieces by tank shells and air strikes. Military bunkers, loaded with sand bags and bristling with mounted machine guns, were set up all over the place. Helicopters flew overhead. An army foot patrol marched toward us alongside the highway. Twenty-four soldiers brandished rifles across their chests. I slowed the car down as we approached so I would not make them nervous. I could see the whites of their eyes as they stared, deadly serious, at me through the windshield. Neither of us dared take their pictures. Those soldiers were not just hanging out and they were not messing around.

The civil war in Eastern Turkey didn’t look anything like it was over. I could tell just from driving through that the Marxist-Leninist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (the PKK) was still active. How else to explain the full-on siege by the army? The Turks’ treatment of Kurds has been horrific since the founding of the republic, but the separatist PKK seems hell-bent on matching the Turks with the worst it can muster, including the deliberate murder of Kurdish as well as Turkish and foreign civilians.

The highway ran right alongside the Syrian border for a stretch. Turkey had walled off the deranged Baathist regime of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad with a mile-wide swath of land mines wrapped in barbed wire and marked with skulls and crossbones. At one point we could look right into a Syrian town in the distance where Kurds lived in possibly worse conditions than even in Turkey. While many, if not most, Turkish nationalists have a near-ideological hatred of Kurdish nationalism, the Arab nationalist regime in Damascus is worse. At least the Turkish government is elected and the Kurds get to vote. The Assad regime is a totalitarian monster that stripped many Syrian Kurds of their citizenship solely for the “crime” of not being Arab.

From a distance it appears that the biggest problem in the Middle East is radical Islam. Islamism surely is the worst of the Middle East’s exported problems, but up close the biggest source of conflict seems to be ethnic nationalism and sectarianism, at least in the Eastern Mediterranean where no state is homogenous. The crackup of the Ottoman Empire has yet to settle down into anything stable. Arab nationalism, Turkish nationalism, and Kurdish nationalism everywhere create bloody borders and internal repression. And that’s just for starters. Lebanese went at other Lebanese for fifteen long years. Sunni and Shia death squads mercilessly “cleansed” whole swaths of Iraq of the other. Syria’s Alawite minority was using the state to violently suppress the Sunni majority.

Every Kurdish village I saw still standing in Eastern Turkey looked grim and forlorn compared with those I had seen in Iraq. The only places in Turkish Kurdistan that looked pleasant, from the main road at least, were those where no people lived, where the army hadn’t dug in, where there was no visible poverty, where there were no blown up buildings, and where you did not look across minefields toward Syria.

Sean and I soon came upon the city of Cizre that straddled the Tigris River on its winding way to Iraq. I was glad we didn’t spend the night there. It didn’t look like a war zone, as parts of the countryside did, but it did look sketchy and miserable. Most businesses were shuttered behind filthy metal garage-style doors. Apartment buildings that looked like low-rise versions of communist public housing units in the former Soviet Union sulked behind crumbling walls. Utterly gone was the quasi-Victorian architecture of central Istanbul, the lovely classical Ottoman-era homes of the mountain interior, and the typically Mediterranean look and feel of the southern coast.

Sean documented the misery with his camera while I drove until I saw, just up ahead, a flatbed truck loaded with armed men who looked like guerrillas.

“Quick, put down the camera,” I said. “Don’t take a picture of those guys.”

They wore keffiyehs on their heads. Only Arabs and Kurds wear keffiyehs. Turks never do, at least none that I’ve seen. These guys were heavily armed and sloppily dressed. They obviously were not Turkish military. They may have been PKK fighters or they may have been what the Kurds call Jash.

The Jash, or donkeys, are “very well paid Kurdish mercenaries that the Turkish government use against the PKK,” said a man I know in Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government. “Many Turkish soldiers aren’t well trained (in most cases don’t have the courage) to fight a guerrilla war in the uncontrollable Kurdish mountains. To save the lives of their soldiers, the Turks hired some local Kurds and paid them very well to fight the PKK on their behalf. During the 1980s Saddam’s regime did the same. He hired locals, mostly escapees from military service, and gave them money and arms. But after the 1991 uprising all of the Iraqi Kurdish Jash failed Saddam and helped the [Kurdish fighters] as they liberated the Iraqi Kurdistan towns and cities one after one.”

As I slowly drove onto a bridge over the Tigris, I noticed that every driver in oncoming traffic stared at us nervously. The vibe on the streets was palpably paranoid even from inside the car. It’s so easy to misunderstand what’s going on in a strange foreign land, especially when you don’t walk around and talk to people, but it was clear that the situation in Cizre in early 2006 was not good.

*

No one is allowed to drive a passenger car from Turkey into Iraq. Only trucks are allowed to cross over. And the truck inspection line stretched for miles.

So Sean and I left the rental car and our non-essential luggage in a gravel lot near the customs gate. We stuffed everything we needed—passports, cash, phone numbers, etc.—into our backpacks and started walking. I sure hoped my Kurdish fixer sent somebody to pick us up. We had long been out of email contact, however, and there was no way to know until we got to the other side.

As we approached the first building we were instantly mobbed by a crowd of gritty middle-aged men.

“Taxi.”

“Taxi.”

“You need a taxi.”

“We’re walking across,” Sean said.

“You can’t walk across,” a man said. “Give me your passports.” He stuck out his hand. “Come on, give me your passports.”

“Who are you?” I said as I sized him up head to toe. He smelled distinctly like trouble.

“I’m a police officer,” he said.

Liar, I thought. Did he think we were stupid? He wore shabby clothes, not an officer’s uniform. And he had the obvious personality of a shake-down artist or braying carpet shop tout.

“Come with me,” he said.

I trusted that he knew the border procedure, but I would not hand him my passport. He led Sean and me into a small room in a trailer where a real police officer sat behind a desk. The officer asked for our passports. We handed them over, he wrote down our names, then handed our passports back.

“Here,” our ‘guide’ said. “Get in this taxi.” He opened the back door of a yellow taxi.

“Why?” I said.

“Just get in,” Sean said, annoyed with my resistant attitude. He got in the back. I climbed in after him. Two strangers, both of them men, hopped in with us. One had horrible pink scars all over his face and his hands.

“Why do we need a taxi?” I said. “I’d rather walk.”

“No one can walk across this border, my friend,” our fake policeman-driver-guide said. “It will cost fifty dollars.”

“Fifty dollars?” I said. “For what? For a one-minute drive down the street? Come on.”

Sean put his hand on my shoulder. He was feeling much more patient than I. I was sleep-deprived and cranky, and I had been shaken down in Egypt and Jordan recently and was in no mood for more.

“Did you notice what happened back there?” Sean said to me quietly. “We jumped to the front of the line and no one complained.”

He was right. There was a huge line of people waiting for taxis. Mr. Fake Police Officer Man yanked us right to the front. I decided to cut him some slack. Yes, he was ripping us off. But he was also speeding things up.

We pulled up to the side of a building. The man with the horrible pink scars on his face got out.

“Follow that man,” our driver said. “He knows what to do.”

We followed him to a drive-thru type window and handed our passports to the border official. He stamped us out of the country and we were set.

“Do you know why that man’s face looks like that?” Sean said on our way back to the taxi.

“No,” I said. “Do you?”

“He’s Iraqi,” Sean said. “Those scars are burns from chemical weapons. I’ve seen photos online. I know that’s what happened to him.”

We drove through a wasteland of devastated buildings, piles of scrap metal and box cars, an unfinished international highway, and derelict drive-thru gates that presumably were closed after the deranged behavior of Saddam’s regime required a shutdown of the Turkish side of the border. After a quick hop over a one-way bridge we were inside Iraq. The Iraqi side was cleaner, more orderly, more prosperous, and far softer on the eyes than the Turkish side. I swear it felt like the sun came out and the birds started chirping as we left Eastern Turkey behind.

An Iraqi Kurdish guard stood in front of the customs house wearing a crisp professional uniform.

“Choni!” I said. Hello, in Kurdish.

Everyone in the car flashed him our passports. He smiled and waved us past a sign that said “Welcome to Iraqi Kurdistan Region.”

Inside the immigration office a bad Syrian soap opera played on TV. We were told to sit down in the waiting area after turning in our passports at the front desk. A young man brought us overflowing glasses of hot sticky brown tea on little plates with dainty spoons.

“Well,” Sean said as he nervously flicked his eyes around the room. “We’re here.”

There are a few advance reading copies of my new book out there and Asher Abrams has read one of them and reviewed it on his blog.

Here’s a taste:

Where the West Ends is, at least superficially, a travelogue about the region straddling eastern Europe and western Asia, during the period from 2006 to 2012. The book is divided into four sections covering the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea. It's roughly the same region covered by Robert D. Kaplan about ten years earlier in Kaplan's book Eastward to Tartary. But Where the West Ends is more personal, and it is astonishing. At times it surreally reminded me of China Mieville's novel The City & the City.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Probably most of us are guilty of throwing around terms like "the West" and "the Middle East" without really thinking too hard about what they mean, or where those places begin or end. If you want to understand what "the West" is, read this book to learn where it is, and where it is not.

There is a persistent feeling of loneliness in this book. It is the loneliness of communities cut off from one another and from themselves; but it's also the loneliness of certain individuals who refuse to be confined within the communal walls that are assigned to them.

There are harrowing stories of violence and cruelty, such as Berisha's tale of the expulsion of the Albanians from Prishtina and the ravaging of Krusha e Vogel. There is Ukraine's memory of the Stalinist "hunger plague" of 1932-1933. But there are also stories of courage and kindness, and of hope.

Three themes emerged for me as I read Where the West Ends. There is the image of the lonely liberal, surrounded by a sea of increasingly hostile and violent factions. There is the conflict between old traditionalism and new fundamentalism. And there is the improbable eruption of pro-Americanism in the strangest places.

The Serbian film writer Filip David is one of those lonely liberals; so is the half-Serbian, half-Bosnian Predag Delibasic, who takes pride in having declared himself variously a Jew, a Muslim, and a Yugoslav - and claims that nonexistent nationality to this day. Perhaps the loneliest, though, is Shpetim Mahmudi, an Albanian Sufi mystic who must watch the gradual encroachment of foreign-backed Arab Islamists on the grounds of his religious compound. His story is tragic.

It also points to something important about religious conflict in the Muslim world: that the conflict is often not - as Westerners sometimes imagine - a case of Western modernity threatening to extinguish Islamic tradition. Rather, it is instead a direct attack on centuries-old, evolving religious traditions by well-armed, well-financed followers of a comparatively recent fundamentalist sect. It is ancient moderation versus newfangled fanaticism.

You can read the whole review here.

The following is a previously unpublished excerpt from my forthcoming book, Where the West Ends.

*

“The forced collectivization of agriculture decreed by the Soviet master and his party likely cost the lives of more people than perished in all countries as a result of the First World War.” - Michael Marrus

“They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.” - Malcolm Muggeridge

I bought a map of Eastern Europe in an old Oregon bookstore that’s as big as a couch when unfolded. The most heavily trafficked roads appear as fat red lines on the paper. Almost all lead directly to Moscow. Even as late as the year 2012, the nerve center of the former Soviet Empire looks on my map like a world-devouring octopus capturing less important capitals in its tentacles.

On a cold night in late October I pointed at a thin red line on that map leading across the former Soviet frontier into Ukraine from a remote corner of Poland.

“Hardly anyone will be on this road,” I said to my old friend Sean LaFreniere. He had just met up with me in Romania so we could hit the road again. “We shouldn’t have to wait long at the border.”

That logic seemed sound at the time, but I’m here to tell you: never, ever, choose less-traveled roads in countries that used to be part of Russia. Driving from even the most backward country in the European Union into the remote provinces of Ukraine is like falling off the edge of civilization into a land that was all but destroyed.

Sean and I hadn’t learned that yet, though, and we wanted a scenic route. European road trips aren’t like road trips in the American West where we live. Outside our major metropolitan areas, huge empty spaces and wide open roads are the norm. Most of Europe is crowded and neither of us wanted to sit in the car for hours in line at the border.

We had no idea what we were in for, but a Polish border guard warned us after stamping our passports.

“It is very strange over there,” he said. “And nobody speaks English.”

Screwing up in the strange parts of the world is never fun and is usually miserable, but you learn things by doing it. You see things that governments and ministries of tourism wished you would not. Ukraine is so strange that you can even see these things in the dark. We actually saw more of Ukraine’s strangeness because we showed up in the dark.

I don’t remember what time we crossed the frontier. Eight o’clock in the evening? Anyway, it was dark. When I say it was dark, I mean it was dark. The back roads of Western Ukraine are as black at night as the most remote parts of the American West where no humans live in any direction.

Yet Western Ukraine is not empty.

And, oh God, the roads. I don’t care where you’ve been. You almost certainly have never seen anything like them.

The second worst road I’ve ever driven on was in Central America in the mid-1990s. It’s only a fraction as bad as the road Sean and I took into Ukraine. This one would have been no worse off had it been deliberately shredded to ribbons by air strikes. The damage was so thorough that the surface could not possibly have been repaved or repaired even once since the Stalinist era.

I white-knuckled it behind the wheel while Sean cringed in the passenger seat. I did not dare drive faster than five miles an hour. Even at that speed I had to weave all over the place to avoid the worst of the gaping holes, some of which were as wide as mattresses and deep enough to swallow TV sets.

I saw no cars, no street lights, not even a single light from a house. Ukraine looked depopulated. My maps said there were villages all over the place, but where were they? Did we just drive into an episode of Life After People?

“This is exactly like Russia,” Sean said. “Exactly.”

He had visited Russia two years earlier and will never forget the vast darkness at night on the train between Moscow and St. Petersburg. “We’re in Russia!” he said.

Then the ghost figures appeared.

They walked on the side of the road in wine-darkness. They did not carry flashlights. They seemed, like us, to be out in the middle of nowhere. It was then that I realized we had entered a town. In the periphery of my headlight beams I could faintly make out a few unlit houses shrouded in shadow away from the road, which was as broken and crumbling as ever. I still hadn’t seen any other cars on the road, nor did I see any parked on the side. I don’t know if the roads were so bad because nobody drove or if nobody drove because the roads were so bad.

“They should put up a sign on the border,” Sean said, “saying That was Europe. You like that? Now prepare for something completely different.”

*

We were on our way to Chernobyl, or at least we thought we were. City Journal assigned me to go there and write about the spooky ghost city of Pripyat that, along with the surrounding area in the so-called Exclusion Zone, was struck by a local apocalypse in 1986. The Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear reactor number four exploded and showered Pripyat, where 50,000 people lived, and the countryside around it with a storm of deadly radiation. Only thirty-one people were dead in the immediate aftermath, but the World Health Organization thinks the long-term effects of radiation poisoning will eventually kill another 4,000. More than 350,000 people in Ukraine and nearby Belarus have been permanently displaced. The fire still burns today beneath the crumbling concrete sarcophagus that caps the reactor.

No one should wander around there alone. The Ukrainian military won’t let you in anyway if you don’t have a guide and a permit. Some of Pripyat’s buildings are still lethally radioactive, and there’s no way to tell them apart from the relatively “safe” ones without sophisticated instruments. The scrap yard, where fire-fighting equipment was abandoned long ago, is spectacularly dangerous. Even mutant animals are rumored to be running around.

Sean and I didn’t yet know it, but the Chernobyl administration was about to cancel our permit and refuse to allow anyone entry. They didn’t say why, but I assume it was because the zone suddenly became more dangerous than usual. We would not get to go, but going there was our plan and we didn’t yet know we would be re-routed. For a while there, we weren’t sure we’d get anywhere in Ukraine, let alone hundreds of miles away to Chernobyl.

First we had to get to Lviv, the “capital” of Western Ukraine and the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism. That first stop alone was almost a hundred miles away. The road was so shattered I was barely able to drive any faster than I could walk. And we were lost. We couldn’t even figure out how to get to Sambir, a small town that was hardly even inside Ukraine at all.

Sambir was spelled Самбір in Ukrainian and only one sign pointed the way. The Cyrillic letters in that particular name resembled the Latin letters well enough that I could figure it out. Then we came to a four-way junction. Road signs pointed to various towns in every direction, but none said Самбір. And none of the towns the signs did point to appeared on my map—or, if they were on my map, I didn’t know how to transliterate their names into Cyrillic. Which way we were supposed to be going?

“Let’s go back,” Sean said, “and ask one of those people on the side of the road.”

I drove back the way we came until I saw two ghostly figures shambling along in the headlights. I pulled over and rolled down the window.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you speak English?” I doubted they did, but this was a way of preparing them for the fact that they weren’t going to hear any Ukrainian or Russian from me.

The two stopped walking and stared. A young man, perhaps 20 years old, held his young girlfriend’s hand. He stared at me with wide eyes and slowly stepped between me and his girl as if I were a threat.

“We’re trying to get to Sambir,” I said and paused. “Sambir,” I said it again in case he understood nothing else but might at least know I needed directions and that he could point the way there. He looked at me and didn’t say anything.

“Sean,” I said. “Hand me that map.”

Sean handed over the map. I pointed at it. “Sambir.” I said. “Which way to Sambir?”

The young man took several of cautious steps back. His girlfriend, terrified, moved behind him and peaked over his shoulder. They backed up another five feet or so, then walked away without saying anything.

“Well, that’s just great,” I said. We were the first foreigners they’d ever seen? Just a few miles from the Polish frontier?

“Go back and take the road that goes to the left,” Sean said. “I’m pretty sure it’s that one.”

“How can you be pretty sure that it’s that one?” I said. I had no idea where we were and wanted someone who lived there to tell us.

“It just feels right,” he said. “If we see any more people, we can stop and ask.”

I was in no mood to argue, and his guess was as good as mine, so we drove back to the four-way intersection and took a left. And we found ourselves in a forest.

 “This doesn’t look right at all,” I said.

“How do you know what it’s supposed to look like?” he said.

“I don’t,” I said. “It just looks like we’re going into the middle of nowhere.”

“Everywhere we’ve been is in the middle of nowhere,” he said.

Perhaps he was right. Suddenly the road improved slightly. I could increase our speed, so I did, but then BANG. I ran us into a sink-sized hole in the ground at twenty miles an hour. The car shuddered as though a land mine had blown off a wheel.

Sean had rented this car on his credit card. “Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

“It’s okay,” I said, though I didn’t for one second believe it. “There’s still air in the tire.”

“Not for long,” he said and put his face in his hands.

I drove onward again, slower this time. We passed a dark house. Somebody lived out there in the forest.

“There are some people up ahead,” Sean said. “Pull over and ask them where the hell we are.”

I pulled the car over next to the two figures. Like the others, they looked ghost-like in the headlights. Like the others, they shuffled along as though they were wandering toward no place in particular for lack of anything better to do in a village at night without light.

This time we encountered not two scared teenagers, but an elderly man and his wife.

They looked startled as though they couldn’t believe someone was out and about in a car.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you speak English?” I was certain they didn’t.

The woman flinched and the man said, “eh?”

“We’re trying to get to Lviv,” I said. Then I pointed at the map. “Lviv.”

Not knowing better, I pronounced it “Luh-viv.”

They had no idea what I was talking about.

“Luh-viv,” I said again, and pointed at the map.

“Eh?” the woman said. “El-veev?”

“Da,” I said, Russian for yes. Many ethnic Russians live in Eastern Ukraine and even ethnic Ukrainians in the west can speak Russian though they’d rather not. The bits of Russian that Sean and I knew were useful wherever we happened to be.

“Da,” I said. “El-veev.”

She pointed in the direction we were heading. “Poland,” she said.

“Unbelievable,” I said. We were on our way back to Poland?

“Argh!” Sean said.

“We’ve been driving around for hours,” I said, “and we haven’t gone anywhere.”

So we turned back. I drove five miles an hour. I weaved around giant holes in the road, but still ran into five or six small ones per second. I had no idea where we were or where we were going. The night was almost half over and we had made zero progress. All we had done so far was damage the car and burn half the gas in the tank.

We eventually came to another small town even though we saw no more signs to even Sambir, let alone Lviv or Kiev. This time a few buildings were lit. One was a gas station. Incredibly, it was open.

I pulled in. Sean and I got out. We both inspected the banged-up wheel. It looked okay and apparently was not leaking air. We were lucky.

A man emerged from the office and asked us—I assume—if we needed gas.

“Do you speak English?” I said and chuckled. I knew he wouldn’t.

Of course he didn’t. A gas station attendant in rural Ukraine is no more likely to speak English than a gas station attendant in rural Kansas is likely to be fluent in Russian. Unlike the others we’d spoken to, though, he didn’t seem surprised or alarmed that the wrong language came out of our mouths.

He filled the tank. I pointed at the map and said “Sambir.” He gave us complicated directions that neither Sean nor I could make sense of. All we could really glean from him was which direction to start with.

I heard children giggling behind the gas station office. A young boy and a young girl, each no older than five, peeked their heads around the corner. They pointed at us and laughed as though we wore clown suits and squeaky shoes. Sean and I were the evening’s entertainment. We spoke an alien language and that made us freaks.

“Good grief,” I said. “Are we going to have to put up with this all week?”

I can only imagine how the locals would have reacted if we were black.

We drove in the dark on hideous roads for another hour. The gas station attendant told us we were supposed to turn left at some point, but we had no idea where.

“I hope it’s not like this everywhere,” Sean said.

“If it’s like this everywhere,” I said, “we won’t even get to Lviv, let alone Kiev and Chernobyl.”

“Turn left here,” Sean said when we came to a road that looked promising for no apparent reason.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

I turned left. After a few minutes we came to a rusting dinosaur of a factory. It was dark and abandoned and clearly had been for decades. After we passed it, the road somehow managed to get worse. I had to slow down to three miles an hour to prevent the car from breaking apart. We’d need an off-road vehicle to keep going.

“This can’t be the way to Lviv,” I said. “No one can drive on this road.”

So we turned back. And eventually we found the town of Sambir. We found it by sheer chance, but we found it. There were a few cars here and there, and some street lights, too. There wasn’t much to it, but it was the closest thing we had yet seen to civilization in Ukraine. And we finally knew where we were on the map.

We had been in Ukraine for four hours and had barely made twenty miles of progress. Lviv was sixty more miles away.

I saw a sign on the side of the road pointing to Львів.

“That must be Lviv,” I said. “I guess their в is our v. And the letter i is the same. I can tell by the way they spelled Sambir on the other signs.” Over the next couple of days, Sean and I would eventually figure out and memorize the entire Cyrillic alphabet this way.

The road did improve after we left Sambir and headed toward Lviv.

“We need food,” I said, though I wondered if that would be possible in a countryside that hardly even had light.

“Look for a sign that says pectopah,” Sean said.

“A sign that says what?” I said.

“Pectopah,” he said. “That’s Russian for restaurant. That’s not how they say it, but that’s what it looks like when they spell it.”

A few moments later we saw a well-lit building on the side of the road that looked like a restaurant. A sign read “Ресторан.”

“There we go,” Sean said.

“It even looks open,” I said.

And it was.

We stepped inside. The place was half full and a few people were still grimly eating.

“Do we wait to be seated or just grab a table?” I said. I had no idea how to behave in this country. Rural Ukraine doesn’t have any handles. We were on the European continent, but we sure weren’t in the West any more.

“Let’s just sit,” Sean said.

So we sat. A waitress stormed over and rudely slapped menus on the table without even looking at us. She couldn’t have made it more clear that she was offended by our existence than if she had thrown them.

The menus were incomprehensible. They were thick as pamphlets and had no English translations or Latin letters. I couldn’t even differentiate between the main course section and the beer list.

“How are we supposed to order?” I said. I wouldn’t mind randomly pointing and just eating whatever she brought, but I might end up pointing at a dessert or even “water” for all I knew.

A large group of people sat at a long table in the back.

“Maybe someone over there speaks English,” Sean said. There were about ten of them. The odds weren’t too bad.

He walked over.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Do any of you speak English?”

“Yes?” a young woman said a bit carefully.

“Thank God” Sean said. “I hate to bother you, but can you help us order some food?”

“I’m from Poland,” she said, “and don’t speak Ukrainian or Russian. We’re all from Poland.”

Great.

“But,” she added and gestured toward an older man at the head of the table, “he speaks some Ukrainian.”

“Yes,” the man said. “I can help you.”

I stood up and walked to the table.

“Thank you so much,” Sean said.

“Hello,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” the man said. “Should I translate the menu for you?”

I chuckled. That would take at least twenty minutes. The menu was huge. “No, no,” I said. “Just please tell the waitress we want some chicken or something. We’re not picky, we just can’t tell her anything.”

So he ordered us chicken.

“Do you want vodka?” he said.

“Yes!” Sean said.

“It’s after midnight,” I said, “and we still have to drive. But damn do I need a drink. So I’ll have a shot.”

“What brings you to Ukraine?” the Polish woman said.

“We’re on our way to Chernobyl,” I said.

She gasped and took a step back.

“Are you crazy?” she said. “I’m not sure I want to know you guys.”

She must have been half-kidding, but I could tell she wasn’t entirely. What was the big deal? Tourists go to Chernobyl now all the time. And I’ve been to far more dangerous places.

“He’s a journalist,” Sean said. “And we’re both photographers.”

I was annoyed that she found our mission repulsive, but tried my best to keep that to myself.

“Thanks for your help,” I said. “We really appreciate it.”

“Well,” she said. “Enjoy your trip to…Chernobyl.”

Back on the road to Lviv, Ukraine still looked depopulated. The road was vaguely okay now, but the small towns and villages in the countryside could hardly have been darker had they been hit by an EMP.

The country clearly hadn’t recovered from the ravages of the 20^th century. Communism was bad in Yugoslavia and even worse in Romania, but the poor souls ruled directly by the Soviet government really got hammered, and few so terribly as the Ukrainians.

The Stalinist-imposed Holodomor—Ukrainian for “hunger plague”—lasted from 1932 to 1933 and killed more people than the Nazi Holocaust. It was a deliberately induced famine meant to put down once and for all the weak yet nevertheless extant Ukrainian nationalism.

“In the actions here recorded,” Robert Conquest wrote in his gut-wrenching book, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, “about 20 human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.” It was, as Wasyl Hryshko wrote, “the first instance of a peacetime genocide in history.”

The great Arthur Koestler witnessed it. He describes, in The God That Failed, “hordes of families in rags begging at the railway stations, the women lifting up to the compartment windows their starving brats, which, with drumstick limbs, big cadaverous heads and puffed bellies, looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles.”

“In one hut there would be something like a war,” Ukrainian-born Soviet dissident Vasily Grossman wrote in his novel, Forever Flowing. “Everyone would keep close watch over everyone else. People would take crumbs from each other. The wife turned against the husband and the husband against the wife. The mother hated the children. And in some other hut love would be inviolable to the very last. I knew one woman with four children. She would tell them fairy stories and legends so that they would forget their hunger. Her own tongue could hardly move, but she would take them into her arms even though she had hardly any strength to lift her arms when they were empty. Love lived on within her. And people noticed that where there was hate people died off more swiftly. Yet love, for that matter, saved no one. The whole village perished, one and all. No life remained in it.”

Ukrainian-born Soviet trade official Victor Kravchenko could finally stand it no more, and so he defected. “Anger lashed my mind as I drove back to the village,” he wrote in his memoir, I Chose Freedom. “Butter sent abroad in the midst of the famine! In London, Berlin, Paris I could see ... people eating butter stamped with a Soviet trade mark. Driving through the fields, I did not hear the lovely Ukrainian songs so dear to my heart. These people have forgotten how to sing! I could only hear the groans of the dying, and the lip-smacking of the fat foreigners enjoying our butter.” 

Sean slept in the passenger seat while I drove in a mental fog. I had long been exhausted by the late hour, the stress from being lost on shattered roads, and our near-complete inability to navigate with poor signage in absolute darkness. I drove on autopilot, barely even aware of what was happening, but I snapped back to consciousness when I found myself suddenly bathed in light inside a European-looking city.

I say it was European-looking, but that was really only partially true. The architecture was European, but something was terribly wrong with this place.

The space between each cobblestone on the streets was enormous. Our rental car’s tires made a hell of a racket, as though we were driving on washboard or tank treads. The streets had hardly been more maintained than those in the back country. They rolled like roads in Alaska that are forced upward every winter by frost heaves.

“Where are we now?” Sean said as he awoke, motion-sick, from the rolling of the car and the clattering of the tires.

“Somewhere in Lviv, I guess.”

Then I realized what else was wrong with the city. It had no economy. We were driving through at three o’clock in the morning, so I didn’t expect to see open restaurants or stores, but I hardly saw any that were even closed. Storefronts scarcely existed and I saw no humans at all. There were no cars on the street and hardly any parked. Lviv looked like a European city emptied of people, or like an alternate universe where none of Europe’s post-war progress had taken place. It must have looked similar the day World War II ended.

Before crossing into Ukraine, Sean and I drove north and spent a night in the spectacular Polish city of Krakow, which includes the largest still-existing medieval square in the world. Poland seems to have recovered from totalitarianism better than any other post-communist country I had seen. I can’t vouch for what Warsaw is like as I have never been there, but much of Krakow looks like it never had a communist government or a command economy. Hungary, too, seems to have mostly recovered. At least that’s how its capital Budapest looks. So much of Ukraine, though, is still haunted and ruined.

I found a hotel and pulled up in front. Parking was easy. None of the other available spaces were taken.

Sean and I dragged our sorry and exhausted selves up to our room. It wouldn’t be too much longer before the sun came up even though the previous day’s sun had only just set when we first reached the border. After driving literally all night, we had only covered a hundred miles.

“Whoa,” Sean said when he pulled open the curtains. “Look at what’s outside our window.”

Good grief, I thought. What now?

We had hardly seen any human beings, automobiles or signs of life or civilization since entering the country. We hadn’t seen a damn thing yet that was normal. I had no idea what to expect out that window. A gigantic bomb crater hardly would have surprised me. What I saw instead were statues of angels at eye level atop the roof across the street. In the sunlight they must have been beautiful, but in the dark they looked like imps with sinister wings.

UPDATE: Autographed copies are sold out.

* * * * *

It is now time to pre-order your autographed copy of my new book, Where the West Ends: Stories from the Middle East, the Balkans, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus. It will be published at the end of this month, but you may get your copy sooner if you order directly from me.

I’m extremely happy with how this turned out. I had more fun writing Where the West Ends than my other books and I think you’ll have more fun reading it, too. This one should also appeal to a much wider audience since it covers more ground.

Here's the text from the back cover:

Prize-winning author Michael J. Totten returns with a masterpiece of travel writing and history in this journey through thirteen nations—all but two formerly communist—just beyond the edge of the West where few casual travelers venture.

His work as an independent foreign correspondent takes him deep into the field beyond the sensational headlines, from his hilariously miserable road trip with his best friend to Iraq and to the Wild West of Albania, the most bizarre country in Europe; from the killing fields in Bosnia and Kosovo to a Romania haunted by the ghosts of its communist past; from the front lines in the Caucasus during Russia’s invasion of Georgia to the otherworldly post-Soviet disasterscape in Ukraine.

Where the West Ends is high-octane adventure writing at its finest and is Michael J. Totten’s most entertaining work written to date. 

 

“Hunter S. Thompson drove to Vegas while tripping: big deal. Michael J. Totten drove to Iraq on a whim and a bad tire while suffering the shuddering flu. Lucky for us, he brought back tales of bribery, bad architecture, Kurdish love, Yanks in unexpected places, and the cigarette smuggler desperate to schlep some smokes past the guys with guns. And that’s just chapter one.” – James Lileks, author of Falling Up the Stairs

“Of all the journalists now alive and writing in English, there are few whose reporting interests me more than Michael Totten's—in fact, none that I can think of offhand. I spent days thinking about Where the West Ends, deeply affected by the eerie melancholy it evokes and the questions it raises about the borderlands of old empires and the places people don't visit for pleasure.” – Claire Berlinksi, author of Menace in Europe

“Michael J. Totten goes on road trips to where the West ends. Every good foreign corespondent should spend some time as a tourist. A higher wisdom is achieved. Reporters are insiders, but it's outsiders who get to look in. Reporters think they're exploring, but tourists know they're lost.” P.J. O’Rourke, author of Holidays in Hell

“At a time when news organizations are limiting their coverage of international affairs to stay-at-home commentators, Michael J. Totten harks back to the golden age of foreign correspondence.” Journalist and screenwriter Matthew Clayfield

My colleague and sometimes traveling companion Armin Rosen has an interesting essay right here in World Affairs that everyone interested in the Arab Spring, Africa, or both ought to check out. He argues that the bloodthirsty Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir may well be on his way out.

Sudan is a bit wide of my regular beat and I profess no expertise whatsoever in what’s going on there, but Armin pays more attention to it than anybody I know and, unlike me, he has been there, and he has been there recently.

Like other Arab dictators over the past year or so, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has ruled Sudan since 1989, is facing what’s liable to be his last days in office. His end might resemble Muammar el-Qaddafi’s, with a mob of angry militants cornering him in a ditch or side street, delirious at the opportunity to exercise some small measure of revenge. Or it might look like Hosni Mubarak’s, with a brief message sheepishly read on state television while an opaque yet orderly reshuffling of power occurs far from the prying eyes of opposition forces or street-level activists. Or perhaps his ouster will be like Ali Abdullah Saleh’s in Yemen, with the despised autocrat staggering impotently toward a graceful exit and eventually leaving the remnants of his political machine to shore up a country on the brink of collapse.

Any of these scenarios is possible in Sudan, whose regime is the most oppressive and violent of those that have come under the winds of the Arab Spring: an Iran-allied and philosophically Islamist government whose top leadership has been indicted for genocide by the International Criminal Court, and which is now engaged in armed struggle against four declared enemies. Like the similarly embattled Baath regime in Syria, the National Congress Party government in Khartoum can only legitimize its rule, or even maintain its country as a coherent political unit, at gunpoint. But unlike the Baath party in Syria, the NCP faces a well-organized and battle-hardened insurgency with national-level coordination and a demonstrated ability to capture and hold onto territory—in addition to a full-blown economic depression, a growing urban protest movement, and a conventional military enemy that’s better organized and far more motivated than the regime’s own professional armed forces. “The regime is over,” says Abdullahi Gallab, a professor at Arizona State University who specializes in Sudanese history and civil society. “There is no regime now. The only thing that is intact or semi-intact are tools of oppression.”

Read the whole thing.

The Middle East is always unstable, but it’s more volatile now than it has been in years. Syria’s civil war threatens to spill over its borders into Lebanon. Egyptian voters sent the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi to the presidential palace in Cairo. The Israelis are publicly mulling the option of a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities. Tehran is threatening a massive retaliation against American military bases in the Persian Gulf region. The Turkish navy just recovered the bodies of air force pilots shot down over the Mediterranean by the Syrian government, bringing NATO one step closer to military intervention in the Levant.

Now is as good a time as any to hit up Rick Francona again for his take on all this. You’ve probably seen him on NBC News where he once worked as a military analyst. He’s a retired intelligence officer and Air Force lieutenant colonel who worked with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Balkans. He flew aerial reconnaissance missions over Laos and Vietnam, worked as a liaison officer to the Iraqi armed forces directorate of military intelligence during the Iran-Iraq War, flew sorties with the Iraqi air force, tried to foment a revolution and a military coup against the government of Saddam Hussein, and led a special operations team on a manhunt against Serbian war criminals in the Balkans. He is fluent in Arabic and Vietnamese and was inducted into the Defense Language Institute Hall of Fame in 2006.

Before writing his first book, Ally to Adversary, he worked at the American Embassy in Damascus as a military intelligence officer and said he very much enjoyed working against the Assad government. He can never go back, at least not while the Baath regime is running the place, because he’d be arrested at once upon arrival in the airport.

He knows more about what has happened behind the scenes and off-camera in the Middle East than just about anyone I’m in regular contact with. Obviously he can’t reveal any classified information or his sources, but he can use that information to inform his analysis. Journalists do this sort of thing, too. I learn all kinds of things in off-the-record interviews that I can’t tell you about, but that doesn’t stop me from integrating that information into my general understanding of what’s going on.

Francona lives just down the road from me on the Oregon coast, but I met him years ago in Israel along the Gaza border during Operation Cast Lead. His new book, Chasing Demons, is his first-person narrative account of his manhunt for Bosnian Serb war criminals in the Balkans, but I thought I’d first ask him about Syria and Egypt, two countries he knows very well.

MJT: You lived and worked in Damascus for a while as a military intelligence officer. What did you learn about the Syrian regime that doesn’t come across in media reports?

Rick Francona: I’m pleasantly surprised at the reporting out of Damascus, especially given the fact that is very difficult to get journalists into Syria now. There are quite a few reporters with excellent backgrounds in Lebanon and Syria –people like you who have been on the ground in good times and bad—who understand the deep division in the multicultural makeup of the country. 

A Syrian friend keeps me apprised of the situation from his point of view—he’s an Assad supporter, but is quick to explain why. It's pragmatic for him. He, like many in the country, fears a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood or some other Islamist group. The regime is adept at playing on the fears of the Shia, the Alawites, secular Sunnis, Christians, and Druze. None of these groups want to see an Islamist Syria.

The media has done a credible job in exposing the Baath Party regime in Syria for exactly what it is—a ruthless, authoritarian, corrupt machine that will do absolutely anything to keep itself in power. Look at the atrocities committed by the regime protection units of the military, the intelligence and security services, and Assad’s ghastly out-of-control militia, the Shabiha, the ghosts. It almost exceeds the bounds of the imagination. I spend a lot of time watching Syrian social media. It’s heartbreaking and sickening. It's also a testament to the courage of the Syrian people. They know what this regime is capable of, yet still they resist.

I’m sure you’re going to ask what we should do about it. I’m torn. I want us to do something, but I want us to do it smartly. We can’t stand by and watch this unfold as it is. It's Rwanda, Kosovo, Sudan, Libya. At some point, this has to be stopped. This has gone beyond politics, beyond fear of Islamists. It's now a matter of stopping the slaughter.

MJT: You’ve spent a lot of time in Syria. How much popular support do you think the Islamists actually have? Syria isn’t the most liberal Arab country around, but it’s not Egypt, either. 

Rick Francona: Based on what I saw of Syria and what I can glean from the news and social media posts from inside the country, I think there is much less popular support for the Islamists than what is being portrayed. For example, there are scores of military defector videos on YouTube. They all start with a canned Islamic invocation and end with another canned Islamic recitation, followed by several rounds of “Allahu Akbar.” It’s obviously scripted. They are being manipulated by what I would assess as a small Islamist minority. The Turks are supporting it, and the AKP in Turkey is about as Islamist as we have seen in Ankara for a long time.

The Syrians aren't as secular as the Lebanese, but the vast majority of the ones I’ve met over the years were more secular than not. Although they self-identified themselves as Muslims, they were not Islamic.

If the Assad regime falls, I believe the secular nature of the Syrians will prevail.

MJT: Do you think arming the Free Syrian Army would be a good idea or a bad idea?

Rick Francona: I think we are arming the Free Syrian Army, albeit indirectly. We've seen this kabuki dance in the past. We claim we’re providing “nonlethal” aid to a group or movement—you know, things like medical supplies, communications equipment, and so on. It's a game. The money they would have had to spend on the things we’re now providing is going to arms. Money is fungible. Once you start giving assistance to a group, you’re assisting that group pretty much in all aspects. Why not be up front and provide the arms they need?

Your question was if it was a good idea. I guess that depends on what our goal is. If we want to see the removal of the Assad regime, we may have to arm them. I don't hold out much hope for the Kofi Annan plan. His latest proposal to have Russia and Iran help manage a transition of power is interesting, but I don't see Iran helping to remove its closest—maybe only–ally in the region unless they are able to replace him with someone equally inimical to American interests.

As much as I don't like the prospect of a civil war in Syria, I think we need to arm and support the Free Syrian Army.

MJT: A lot of Americans on both the left and the right worry that supporting them will blow back in our faces, that the Islamist element will end up controlling the country and will turn it into a Muslim Brotherhood state. So let me ask you this: even if you think that outcome is unlikely, do you think a Brotherhood-controlled Syria would be better or worse from our point of view than the Syria of Bashar al-Assad?

Rick Francona: That's a tough call. It’s hard to imagine anything worse than an Assad regime surviving this uprising. If he does survive, he will have validated—in his own mind, anyway—the legitimacy of his government.

If I had a choice between the two, the lesser of two evils if you will, I guess I would opt for the Brotherhood-controlled Syria. At least there would be a fair chance that we could break Syria away from its alliance with Iran. Although the Shia Islamic regime in Tehran has in the past worked with Sunni fundamentalist groups—Hamas and Islamic Jihad come to mind—the Brotherhood may not be interested in continued close ties with Iran.

It's probably an antagonist of a different color, but still an antagonist. Not a perfect world.

MJT: Last time you and I discussed Egypt you said that what happens there as a product of the Arab Spring will affect the United States more than what happens anywhere else. Do you still think that’s true now that Assad is on the ropes? And if it is true, what do you suppose it might mean for the United States given the direction post-Mubarak Egypt is heading?

Rick Francona: When all is said and done, Egypt is still the heart of the Arab world. What happens in Egypt resonates across the region, much more so than Syria. Syria is important, especially since Iran uses Syria to support Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syria will be critical to the eventual continuation of the peace process, but what happens in Egypt will have much more impact on the region as a whole. Despite Syria's current notoriety, Egypt is still the primary issue.

Instability in Egypt might spread to the east to Saudi Arabia and Israel. I’m not sure Mohamed Morsi, the new president, will maintain the peace treaty with Israel. The Islamists have threatened to abrogate it, only making the situation in the region that much more tense. A complication none of us need, not Egypt, not Israel, and not the United States.

MJT: How might Egyptian instability spread to Saudi Arabia?

Rick Francona: Egypt is a role model for many of the youth across the Arab world. Egyptian political thought is well-respected throughout the region, including in the Gulf States. You can find fault with the Egyptian republic under Hosni Mubarak, but it was at least nominally a republic. In Saudi Arabia, there are at least two generations of educated and well-traveled young people who have no meaningful input into the governance of the kingdom. Not all Saudis are rich. There is resentment among many of the poor in the society.

These disaffected youth, whom we’d normally cite as ripe for recruitment by the likes of Al Qaeda, want more. They see what their brothers and sisters are accomplishing in the streets of Cairo and it plants a seed. They ask themselves, why can't we do the same here?

Of course, we know the short answer. While the Egyptian military refused to take action against its own citizens, the Saudi security services—which can be ruthless—may not exercise such restraint. The Saudis have been good at ferreting out dissidence, so I am not sure a Cairo-style uprising will succeed. That does not mean they may not try. 

Everyone is watching Cairo.

MJT: What do you suppose is the realistic worst-case scenario for Egypt in the short and medium term?

Rick Francona: Morsi ushers in a wave of Islamic reforms and tries to convert Egypt into an Islamic state. That does not portend well for Israel or for us. If Morsi wins, watch SCAF, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and Marshal Mohamed Tantawi. I am not sure they will stand by as Morsi tries to abrogate the treaty with Israel and change Egyptian society.

MJT: You’ve worked with the Egyptian army in the past. Does it seem more ideological to you now? It does to me, but maybe it’s not. Maybe Mubarak just kept the temperature a bit cooler.

Rick Francona: It’s hard to say, but given some of the recent statements by officers I thought were fairly secular, I tend to agree with you. I’m not sure how much of that is for public consumption or is an attempt to legitimize themselves in their current positions. Perhaps they were more ideological all along and they adjusted to Mubarak's secular tendencies. Like I said, it’s hard to say. I’m watching the Supreme Council to see what happens after the election.

MJT: You’ve also spend a lot of time working with (rather than against, as in Syria) the Jordanians. Do you think the Arab Spring might spread there? And if so, would that be a good thing or a bad thing?

Rick Francona: The Arab Spring may have already spread there to some extent. King Abdullah is much more politically astute than many have given him credit for. He seems able to see what’s going on and make small and subtle shifts to head off the kinds of confrontations seen in the rest of the Arab world. There’s an undercurrent of opposition, to be sure, but between his attempts to engage the opposition and his really good internal security apparatus, up until now he's been able to keep a lid on it.

Recently there was a large multi-national military exercise in Jordan with thousands of foreign troops there. It didn’t seem to raise any real objections among the people.

Jordan has a special place in my heart. I really don't want to see too much change. I think the king has a pretty good handle on it. Jordan is a close ally, one that we need as the effects of the Arab Spring become more apparent.

MJT: How did an old Middle East hand and Arabic linguist like yourself get chosen to lead a hunting party for Bosnian Serb war criminals?

Rick Francona: I jokingly tell people that I upset someone in the Defense Intelligence Agency operations hierarchy, but that's probably not really the case. In 1997, General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander, was growing frustrated with the lack of progress on arresting the dozens of mostly ethnic Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina indicted for war crimes by an international tribunal.

The local Serb authorities refused to arrest them. For the most part, they were regarded as national heroes. Clark ordered the Americans, Dutch, and British to find eleven of these guys and detain them. The Defense Department portion of the two US teams were to be headed by lieutenant colonels. For whatever reason, the DIA director of operations chose me.

It was a surprise, especially since we were just starting our operations to find Osama bin Laden. To be pulled from a priority Middle East target to go to Bosnia and hunt down five guys came as a surprise. A valid mission, sure, but why for me? I don't speak any of the languages, I’d never been in the Balkans and knew little of the situation. As you said, I was a Middle East guy.  

When the general called me to his office to hand me the mission, he didn't frame it in the form of a question, so off I went.

MJT: One line in particular in your new book really struck me. You wrote that you asked Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims what they think will happen when the Americans and NATO leave and everyone answered the same way: “We’re going to finally take care of the xxx (fill in the other ethnic group).” Should we stick around in Bosnia for the indefinite future then? And what would you say to Americans who don’t care if Bosnia turns into a bloodbath again?

Rick Francona: Fortunately, we have been able to “EU-ize” the troop presence there. What should have been a European operation from the beginning required American troops because, as we all know, NATO without the United States is a hollow force. Look at the Libyan operation as an example. Without American command and control, intelligence, aerial refueling, precision-guided munitions stockpiles, electronic warfare and airlift, it would have not been doable. Likewise, if there was to be any intervention in Bosnia, it required U.S. forces.

The Europeans understand that there has been no political solution to the issues that caused the problem in Bosnia. All we and NATO have done is issue a big “time out.” The hatred remains.

It would be hard to convince Americans to care about Bosnia. Human suffering aside, at some point, the Bosnians—and by that I mean the Muslims—and the Serbs are going to have to come to terms. Those terms may be another round of violence or some political realignment, but keeping troops between them is all that’s stopping them from killing each other all over again.

MJT: Of Bosnia’s three ethno-sectarian groups—the Catholic Croats, the Orthodox Serbs, and the Bosniak Muslims—who were the most politically friendly to Americans?

Rick Francona: By the time I got there, the Croats were pretty much irrelevant. Most of them had either moved to Croatia or had assumed a low profile in the Bosniak areas. What little dealing I had with them were non-confrontational.

The Muslims seemed to appreciate why we were there. They regarded the Americans as the ultimate guarantors of their safety. We moved around the Muslim areas with very little concern for our safety. 

That said, the PIFWCs—persons indicted for war crimes—we were sent to track down and detain were all ethnic Serbs and lived deep in the Serb area, the Republika Srpska, or as we called it, “Injun country.” When moving in the Serb areas, almost always in civilian clothes and unmarked Jeep Cherokees—a common vehicle there—we had to be careful. The Serbs, unlike the Muslims, regarded us as being against them. Not only were the people generally reserved and somewhat hostile, the police were usually, let us say, unhelpful and obstructive. Given what we were trying to do it was best to avoid them and not draw attention to ourselves.

My impression was that they were waiting for us to leave so they could start up the ethnic cleansing again.

MJT: How would you compare Bosnian Muslims to Arab Muslims? I was struck by how secular and even atheistic they seemed on the surface when I was there a few years ago. In Sarajevo I saw only two or three women a day wearing headscarves, for instance. But you spent a lot more time there than I did. Do you get the sense that Bosnia is somewhat post-religious the way most other European countries are, or are the Bosnians just less outwardly demonstrative about their religion?

Rick Francona: It seemed to me that in Bosnia, “Muslim” is more an identity, an ethnic grouping, than a religion. It’s like being Jewish but not a religious Jew. I got the impression that there was almost no Islamic identity aside from the description. But, as I said, we tended to spend most of our time chasing Serbs.

MJT: Did you learn anything in Bosnia that applies to the Middle East? 

Rick Francona: Perhaps it’s the other way around. When I arrived in Bosnia with no real background in the Balkans other than the briefings on the mission and operation, I felt really unprepared. After I was there a few days, I noticed a lot of similarities in the basic divisions in the population. In Bosnia, the major division of course was between the Orthodox Serbs and the Muslim Bosniaks, sort of like in Lebanon, although without nearly as many factions.

As in the Middle East, I realized that once someone on either side injects religion into the argument, you might as well stop talking. The Serbs were adamant about their “right” to the land. Once someone invokes their deity into the rationale for what they are doing, they become irrational. I just walk away.

We all have to deal with people who are different from us, but these guys in the Balkans took it to an extreme and killed thousands of innocent people.

Postscript: You can buy Rick Francona’s new book Chasing Demons: My Hunt for War Criminals in Bosnia, from Amazon.com.

You can also pitch in toward my travel expense fund so I can head back into the field later this summer. Of course I’d like to get into Syria, but if that proves impossible my most likely destination in the meantime will be Libya.

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The Islamists who recently took over the northern portion of Mali are systematically destroying a Sufi Muslim World Heritage Site because it’s “idolatrous.”

Philistines who behave this way are the kinds who start wars. Let’s not forget that 9/11 happened shortly after the Taliban destroyed the Buddha statues at Bamiyan for the same reason.

Lest you think I’m blowing this out of proportion, the group responsible for this—Ansar Dine—is an Al Qaeda franchise. They’re flying the black Salafist flag. And they control Timbuktu and all the surrounding area.

I've wanted to visit Timbuktu for years--it looks absolutely fascinating--but now it's impossible.

If you’re a geek about foreign policy or environmentalism, you’ve almost certainly read or at least heard about ominous warnings that wars in the future will be fought over water.

That’s not at all likely to happen if this pans out:

Graphene. It can be stronger than steel and thinner than paper. It can generate electricity when struck by light. It can be used in thin, flexible supercapacitors that are up to 20 times more powerful than the ones we use right now and can be made in a DVD burner. It’s already got an impressive track record, but does it have any more tricks up its sleeve? Apparently, yes. According to researchers at MIT, graphene could also increase the efficicency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude. Seriously, what can’t this stuff do?

Desalination might sound boring, but it’s super important. Around 97% of the planet’s water is saltwater and therefore unpotable, and while you can remove the salt from the water, the current methods of doing so are laborious and expensive. Graphene stands to change all that by essentially serving as the world’s most awesomely efficient filter. If you can increase the efficiency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude (that is to say, make it 100 to 1,000 times more efficient) desalination suddenly becomes way more attractive as a way to obtain drinking water.

Desalination works exactly as you might expect; you run water through a filter with pores small enough to block the salt and not the water. It’s a process called reverse osmosis. The issue is that the thicker your filter is, the less efficient the process is going to be. If you know anything about graphene, you know where this is going. Graphene sheets are one atom thick.

This wasn’t hard to see coming:

According to secular Syrian rebels interviewed in Istanbul, even though the insurgency to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is increasing in size and sophistication, Gulf Arab states—chiefly Saudi Arabia—are empowering Islamists at the expense of majoritarian secularists. Rebels from the Idlib and Hama provinces fear that religious extremists will be harder to control or contain in a post-Assad state, a consequence they see as leading directly from continued American myopia and inaction on Syria.

There is no chance the Arab world—and especially not the Saudis—would just sit back and watch as a totalitarian Alawite state slaughters Sunni Arabs by the thousands. And there was also never a chance that the Saudis would empower liberal, moderate, and secular Sunnis by giving them guns.

The longer this goes on as a straight-up sectarian war between Sunnis and Alawites, the worse the final outcome is going to be.

Robert Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says “it would be a grave error…to fixate on the obstacles the [Egyptian] army has put in the way of the Islamists without appreciating the latter's remarkable ability to fill any political vacuum they are permitted to fill.” After thinking about this for a day or so, I think he’s right. My initial reaction to Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi’s victory two days ago was a little too flip.

I’ve been half-expecting a less bloody version of the Algeria crisis in the 1990s where the secular police state voided the election after the Islamists won, precipitating civil war. It’s still too soon to rule that out, but let’s assume for now that it won’t happen, that the Muslim Brotherhood has some (albeit limited) power right now and will use as much of it as possible to transform Egypt in its own image. What should we expect to see happen?

Here’s Satloff on the regional ramifications:

While confirmation of Morsi's victory may spare Egypt a potentially violent faceoff between Islamists and the military, the shockwaves will be felt across the Middle East. This ranges from the wilderness of Sinai, where more-violent Islamists will push the Ikhwani leader toward confrontation with Israel; to the suburbs of Aleppo and Damascus, where the Morsi example will be a fillip to Islamists fighting Alawite rule; to the capitals of numerous Arab states, especially the monarchies, where survivalist leaders mortified by the prospect that Islamist revolutions could trump their claims of religious legitimacy will double-down on their velvet-glove/iron-fist strategies to fend off the fervor for change.

Reactions will differ by country. Wealthy Gulf states, more fearful of the Brotherhood's populist message than welcoming of its Islamist content, will offer aid to Egypt, but only enough to keep the country hungry without starving. Jordan, caught between an Egyptian Islamist rock and a Syrian jihadist hard place, will move closer to Washington and Israel. For its part, Israel will cling to the SCAF, with whom it has more intimate contact and better relations today than at any point in years. In other words, everyone will play for time.

But what happens after time passes? A now-volatile place like Egypt can’t remain in a holding pattern forever.

Here is Lee Smith in Tablet:

The Brotherhood, as the culmination of the Muslim reform movement, is the embodied critique of modern Muslim communities. The lands of Islam were inferior to the West because of how Muslims practiced Islam. The problem then is not that this well-oiled political machine has never actually governed a country or managed an economy, or that its practical political theory is derived from a 7th-century desert utopia ruled by the prophet of Islam. The real issue is that the Brotherhood perceives itself as a corrective—not simply to the Mubarak regime, but to the way ordinary Egyptians have conducted their affairs for the last half millennium or so. This is the Brotherhood’s ideological core, which may well spell disaster not only for the rights of women and minorities, but also for millions of other Egyptians.

Morsi has said that he is the president for all Egyptians. The question is how, particularly in the middle of an international economic meltdown, he can reconcile more than 80 million Egyptians to the Brotherhood’s rule. What has made the organization attractive for all these years is not its vision, its policies, whatever those turn out to be, but rather resistance, negation, a dynamism built on the foundations of conflict. Morsi will likely have little choice in the matter: To manage an Egypt perpetually on the verge of chaos, he will have to project internal conflict outward. In due time, Egypt will make war either on itself, or on Israel.

Sorry to be grim here, but I see no possibility whatsoever of a happy outcome in this country. Egypt is by far the most Islamist place I’ve ever seen. That volcano can only stay plugged for so long.

Egypt has a Muslim Brotherhood president now. His name is Mohamed Morsi. It wasn’t hard to see that one coming, but it’s worth pointing out that it did, in fact, happen.

The question now is: does it even matter? The army is still in the saddle. It may turn out that what Egypt actually has is a Muslim Brotherhood figurehead. We’ll see.

If you know who George Galloway is, I don’t have to tell you that his opinion of what’s happening right now in Syria is rank and appalling. You might get a kick out of watching him say it, however. Not even the most ardent Arab Nationalist propagandist I’ve ever met knows how to push all the emotional buttons quite this effectively. 

Jews lived all over the Middle East and North Africa for thousands of years, and they lived among Arab Muslims for more than 1,000 years, but they’re almost extinct now in the Arab world. Arabs and Jews didn’t live well together, exactly, but they co-existed five times longer than the United States has existed. They weren’t always token minorities, either. Baghdad was almost a third Jewish during the first half of the 20^th century. Morocco and Tunisia are the last holdouts. In Tunisia, only 1,500 remain.

What happened? What changed? Islam didn’t happen all of a sudden, nor did the arrival of Arabs in Mesopotamia, the Levant, and North Africa. Both have been firmly in place since the 7^th century. A far more recent cascade of events transformed the region, and for the worse: the occupation of Arab lands by Nazi Germany and its puppet Vichy France, the Holocaust, post-Ottoman Arab Nationalism, Israel’s declaration of independence, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As a consequence of all that, rather than the Arab invasion or the rise of the Islamic religion, almost the entire Arab world is Judenrein now. And since the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Republic regime in Iran, relations between Arabs and Jews are worse than they were at any time during the entire history of either.

Yet 1,500 Jews hang on in Tunisia. The ancien Ben Ali regime kept them safe, as has Tunisia’s relatively tolerant and cosmopolitan culture. But what will become of them now that Ben Ali is in exile and his government is overthrown?

I met with Haim Bittan, the chief rabbi of Tunis. My colleague Armin Rosen joined me, as did our fixer and translator Ahmed Medien.

“You should say something to the rabbi in Hebrew,” Ahmed told Armin. Armin is Jewish and speaks a bit of the language of Israel. “It will make him happy.”

The three of us met the rabbi and his assistant in an office behind an enormous synagogue in central Tunis. I wanted to take a picture of the synagogue, but the police wouldn’t let me. They’re worried someone might bomb it. I found one on Wikipedia, though.

Armin took Ahmed’s advice and greeted the rabbi and his assistant in Hebrew. Their faces lit up. It was an interesting moment. There were five of us in that room. Three Jews, one nominal Christian (me), and one nominal Muslim (Ahmed). For the first time since Armin arrived in the country, he wasn’t the token Jew in the room.

“How has the situation here changed for the Jews of Tunisia,” I said, “since the fall of Ben Ali?”

“Nothing has changed,” the rabbi said. “It’s the same situation since Ben Ali’s fall.”

“This is a country ruled by an Islamist government,” Armin said. “Do you feel that presents any problems for the Jewish community?

“There’s no problem between the government and the Jewish community,” the rabbi said.

“But I have seen photographs of Salafists with their black flag in front of the synagogue here intimidating people,” I said. “Was that a one-time event, or are you worried they might become increasingly dangerous?”

“They don’t bother me,” the rabbi said. “They lived with us before. That incident was their business, not ours.”

What kind of answers were these?

Ahmed, our Tunisian translator and fixer, had a question of his own for the rabbi.

“Does it bother you that some people want Islamic law in the constitution?” he said.

“There’s no problem at all,” the rabbi said, “because the constitution is not written.”

“He doesn’t want to answer,” Ahmed said quietly to Armin and me as he leaned back in his chair.

I’m not even sure why the rabbi agreed to be interviewed. He answered almost all of our questions this way, as did his assistant. They answered as though the entire Arab world would judge them for what they said and pounce if they uttered a peep of complaint. They reminded me of citizens of police states who are asked on the record what they think of the government.

I didn’t want to get them in trouble or give them the third degree, but I needed something other than packaged boilerplate answers, so I chose a question that couldn’t be easily dodged. The rabbi’s assistant wore a black yarmulke or kippah on the top of his head, which marked him out as an obvious Jew, and I addressed my question to him.

“Do you walk around, either of you, on the street wearing the kippah?”

He vigorously shook his head. “We don’t,” he said. “People might think we’re Zionists and we don’t want that, so we wear a hat.”

They had at least one problem then. They felt the need to be closeted, at least on the street. That’s never a good sign.

Christians don’t have to hide the fact that they’re Christian. Everyone in Tunisia who so much as glanced at me surely assumed I’m a Christian (that is, if they gave the matter any thought in the first place) since I look European. Nearly all were perfectly friendly.

They were perfectly friendly to Armin, as well. His complexion makes him look ethnically ambiguous. He could be Hispanic, Arab, Italian, Israeli. He could be many things. He received no more and no less hospitality than I did. But what if he walked around wearing a kippah or a necklace with a six-pointed star? The rabbi’s assistant wouldn’t dare.

It’s hard to say, though, how much trouble Armin actually would have faced had he done that. Israelis can and do visit Tunisia. They can do so on their own passports. They don’t have to use second passports from a country like Britain or the United States the way Israeli visitors to Lebanon do.

And here’s the thing: when you visit Tunisia you have to produce your passport a lot.  You have to produce your passport every time you check into a hotel. You have to produce your passport to rent a car. You have to show your passport to police officers and the national guard at checkpoints. (That happened to me a number times.) So Israelis—not just Jews, but Israelis—can and do wander around all over Tunisia and announce to the police and to the staff at hotels, airports, and car rental offices that they’re Israelis. And supposedly they don’t experience any problems.

I’m not sure what to make of it. I’d like to report that the Jews are doing just fine, but if that’s the case, why were the rabbi and his assistant so cagey? And why wouldn’t they go out in public looking like Jews? Ahmed didn’t even blink when Armin told him he’s Jewish, nor did he mind in the slightest that Armin and I have both been to Israel. Ahmed, though, is a well-educated tri-lingual professional, and his own views of the Arab-Israeli conflict are, shall we say, unconventional compared with those of his neighbors.

Armin asked the rabbi why Libya and Algeria are entirely free of Jews while Tunisia is not.

“Jews in Tunisia don’t have any problems living with other people,” the rabbi said. “In the other countries they did.”

And that’s all he had to say about that.

“But a lot of Tunisian Jews did leave and go to Israel,” I said. “Why did they leave while you stayed?”

“Only a few Tunisian Jews went to Israel,” he said, “but they went for economic reasons. Maybe they didn’t have a lot here and they wanted to go there for the economic opportunities. Those who had good lives here stayed.”

Such cautious answers! Move along, nothing to see.

He might have answered differently had I not been a reporter, but who knows? There’s always a chance he has internalized what he’s saying to keep his stress level down, but I don’t think so. I can’t psychoanalyze the man, but his tone of voice and body language suggested he was extremely reserved and not entirely sincere in what he was saying.

“What’s the Jewish community’s view on relations between Tunisia and Israel?” Armin said. Tunisia had low-level diplomatic relations with Israel during the 1990s, but Ben Ali severed those relations during the Second Intifada. “There’s talk of banning normalization with Israel in the constitution.”

“That’s a matter for the government to decide,” the rabbi said, “not the Jewish community here.”

“But the Jewish community surely has an opinion,” Armin said.

I understand that he has to be careful, but we wanted the truth even if we couldn’t quote him. “You can answer off the record,” I said. “I’ll turn my voice recorder off if you want.”

He didn’t want me to turn off the recorder, but he understood that I didn’t like his evasiveness so he gave me a better answer.

“If Tunisia normalized relations with Israel,” he said, “then the Muslims here might bother Jews. So we would rather Tunisia not have normal relations with Israel.”

That was an on-the-record response. So at least he was willing to acknowledge the potential for trouble for Tunisia’s Jews.

I don’t mean to suggest that they’re oppressed and that the chief rabbi of Tunis answered questions with a gun in his back. I do not believe they are oppressed. At least I’m unaware that they are oppressed. But it’s hard to be a minority anywhere in the world. And it has been so hard to be a Jew in the Arab world lately that there are almost none left.

The rabbi can’t be entirely wrong. Tunisia’s Jews are not prisoners. They’re free to leave if they like. They can visit Europe without any problems. They can visit Israel without any problems. Since they can visit Israel, they can make aliyah and receive citizenship automatically upon arrival. All a Tunisian Jew has to do if he wants to permanently relocate to Israel is buy a one-way ticket to Tel Aviv for 200 dollars. That’s less than an average month’s salary, so coming up with the money wouldn’t be hard.

Even if it’s more difficult to live as a Jew in Tunisia than the rabbi and his assistant let on, it’s possible to live there as a Jew. More than a thousand do so voluntarily. That’s something. Isn’t it?

I wanted to know if Tunisian Jews and Muslims socialize with each other or if they live entirely separate lives. Do they visit each other’s houses? Do they hang out in cafes?

The rabbi’s assistant answered by shaking his head.

It’s always a good idea to talk to minorities in the Middle East. They see things at a different angle from everyone else. The Jews I met in Tunisia, though, had no more to say about the revolution, the new government, or where Tunisia is heading than they did about their own circumstances. They were too cautious to say much of anything. 

Perhaps the Christians could help. They have fewer reasons to be wary than Jews. Christians are having a hard time in lots of Arab countries, but in most places they live in a multicultural paradise by comparison.

Tunisia’s Christians, though, aren’t Tunisians. They’re foreigners. The number of Christian Tunisians is apparently almost zero. Nearly all are Europeans and sub-Saharan black Africans. There are quite a few churches around—and they’re full on Sundays, too—but you won’t find many Arabs inside.

Armin and I spoke to Father John MacWilliam, a Catholic priest and missionary with the White Fathers movement. He’s from Great Britain and spent years in the inferno of Algeria before moving to Tunis.

“Is it true that most Christians here aren’t Tunisians?” I said.

“I’m British,” he said, “and I’m Christian, but most Tunisians, 99% or more, are Muslims, at least officially. If you go to any church on Sunday, all the people are foreigners.”

“There isn’t even a little community of indigenous Christians here,” I said, “like the Copts in Egypt? What happened to them?”

“By the 15^th century there were no indigenous Christians living in this part of North Africa,” he said.

They all converted to Islam. Judaism, though, kept a toe hold in the country, a toe hold it still has. Most Tunisian Jews are the descendents of Berbers, the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa before Arabs invaded in the 7^th and 8^th centuries. Two-thirds of Tunisia’s Jews live on the southern island of Djerba, a part of the country that is still more Berber and less Arabized. (Djerba, by the way, is the famous island of Homer’s Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey.)

Father MacWilliam moved to Tunis from Algeria, where he lived for thirteen years.

“Were you driven out?” I said, but he shook his head. “No? You were there during all that trouble? I know a lot of Christians were killed.”

By “trouble” I was referring, of course, to the Algerian civil war in the 1990s when radical Islamists waged a ferocious terror insurgency that killed more than 100,000 people.

“It was a black decade,” he said. “How many hundreds of thousands of people were killed, I don’t know, but only a very small proportion were Christians. In the Catholic church there were 19 altogether killed. Most people know about the six monks in Tibhirine. Four of my congregation in Tizuzu were killed. There were others. It was difficult, but in other ways it was enriching because we were there helping. I opened libraries and supported university students. A lot of foreigners left, a lot of embassies closed, a lot of companies left. The Catholic church didn’t leave. We stayed. When things get difficult you don’t leave your friends.”

Westerners who live in Arab countries are often treated better than locals. They’re given a certain amount of latitude and liberty that governments sometimes think would be dangerous if enjoyed by everyone else. I’ve never worried that secret police would arrest me, for instance, if I insulted the president at a cafe. I don’t want to be tailed or spied on in my hotel room, of course, but if they bug my phone, at the end of the day, what are they going to do? The worst an Arab police state will do to me is arrest me, interrogate me, throw me out of the country, and put me on a blacklist. Citizens in oppressive Middle Eastern countries worry the police will show up at their house with a blowtorch and pliers, that their children will go missing, that they’ll be tortured to death.

The people I need to worry about most in the Middle East are criminals and terrorists. Foreigners were right to leave Algeria during the 1990s. They were singled out for destruction along with liberals, artists, feminists, intellectuals, cosmopolitans, teachers—basically anyone who didn’t precisely fit the description of an ultra-conservative Salafist nutjob. So it’s rather extraordinary that only 19 Christians were killed during that time.

My hat is off to Father MacWilliam. When things get difficult you don’t leave your friends. That’s what he said. But if I was in Algeria while Salafists were hacking thousands of people to death with machetes, I would have left. Almost anyone would have left. Maybe MacWilliam is a better person than I am. Maybe he’s nuts. Maybe he’s both. Either way, he grit his teeth and stayed through an unspeakable bloodbath.

Tunisia must feel like Switzerland by comparison. Christians in Tunisia have it pretty good. They have a few restrictions placed on them, but they can basically do whatever they want, partly because as foreigners and they’re subject to less social pressure. What if they weren’t foreigners, though? What if they were Tunisians? Would they be second-class citizens like the Christians of Egypt?

Probably not. The Jews aren’t. They clearly face a great deal of social pressure, but 1,500 live there by choice. And they’re equal under the law, at least on paper. Those facts right there are extraordinary even if the Jews do have to hunker down nervously amongst themselves.

The question is: how long can they last? Will they still be there in 100 years? Perhaps Father MacWilliam could safely address that question more directly than the rabbi.

“People here talk a lot about the religious extremists who are against the liberal values of other parts of the society,” he said. “But we have religious freedom. Religious freedom is important to Tunisians. This is a country with a long history as a civilization. Tunisians are proud of the fact that it’s a country with a multitude of civilizations. And since independence it has developed human rights. On the issue of women’s rights, for instance, Tunisia is more advanced than other Arab countries.”

It’s true. Women and men have been equal under the law in Tunisia for decades. Ninety-five percent of Egyptian girls reportedly have their clitoris removed when they’re young, but female genital mutilation doesn’t even exist in Tunisia. Wikipedia has a page that lists the percentage of FGM incidence by country and Tunisia doesn’t even appear next to an asterisk.

Ahmed, my fixer, told me a Salafist group brought Egypt’s notorious Jew-hating creepjob Wagdy Ghoneim to Tunis. The man proposed Tunisia start cutting off little girls’ clitorises and the entire country freaked out. Human rights activists sued him just for bringing it up.

But what about the Jews? I had an awfully hard time getting straight answers. How are things really going these days? I asked Father MacWilliam about it directly. He, at least, eschewed sugar-coating.

“I don’t know the Jewish community here,” he said. “There are Tunisian Jewish families who have been here for centuries. Their synagogue, of course, is protected. It functions, but I think they keep a fairly low profile. There’s an amalgam of what is Jewish and what is Israeli. Many Arabs assume that anyone who’s Jewish is also Israeli and Zionist and is oppressing the Palestinians and so on. That doesn’t make it easy for somebody who’s Jewish to openly be known as Jewish. They are probably a more oppressed minority.”

But how oppressed are the Jews, really? It’s so hard to say. I can’t very well report that they’re oppressed when I have no more evidence for that than you’re reading here in this article. I also can’t say they’re perfectly fine because they say they’re perfectly fine. Not when the rabbi and his assistant were so reluctant to say anything. I’ve been in this business a long time. I know how people behave in interviews when they’re nervous. And those two were nervous.

I did meet one Tunisian Jew, though, who spoke a little more freely. His name is Jacob Lellouche and he owns a kosher restaurant called Mamie Lily (after his grandmother) in the posh Tunis suburb of La Goulette. 

Ahmed took me and Armin there for dinner. Armin and I were both surprised to discover that we were the only non-Muslims having kosher Jewish food for dinner that night. Nearly all Lellouche’s customers are Muslims. Why? “Because Tunisia’s Jews are used to eating this food at home,” Lellouche said. The place was packed, too. We had to wait almost an hour for a table.

Armin asked if his restaurant business has changed since the revolution. Has it gotten better or worse?

“My clients here are the same,” Lellouche said. “A lot of Tunisians come here, and some people come from France also. But this isn’t a touristic place.”

“So,” Armin said, “is there some appreciation then among Muslim Tunisians for the country’s Jewish culture?”

“I’m not only the owner of this restaurant,” Lellouche said. “After the revolution I created the first cultural Jewish association. It’s called Dar al-Dekra, the house of memory. Ninety percent of the association’s members are Tunisian Muslims. The civil society sustains the Jewish community. An Arab Tunisian association whose name translates to ‘I’m Free and I Work for My Country’ is here tonight to write a communiqué, a press release.”

Lellouche says his business is doing okay. That’s good, especially with the post-revolutionary economic depression. But how are Jews faring in general after the fall of Ben Ali? Are they doing better or worse?

“I wouldn’t say better,” he said. “We have to live our lives and make our place in this country. That’s all. We have to keep our culture in Tunisia’s memory. We are its guardians. Our association will create the first Jewish museum in Tunisia.”

He says he believes Jews will always remain in Tunisia. Not only are the Jews not enjoying their last days in the country, there won’t ever be any last days. Maybe he really believes that. Maybe he only wants to believe it. Maybe it’s even true, but we shouldn’t assume it. Muslim-Jewish relations are in the abyss. What will happen if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict heats up again or if the mushrooming Salafists go on a rampage like they did next-door in Algeria?

“Was it possible,” Armin said, “to have an organization like yours before the revolution?”

“It was difficult,” Lellouche said, “because Mr. Ben Ali, our last president, instrumentalized the Jewish community. He wanted to project an image of tolerance and say to France and America that the Jews still live here because he wants them to live here. But I don’t think that was true. We don’t have problems with the society, though perhaps there is some trouble now with the Salafists.”

Salafists haven’t threatened Lellouche or his restaurant, but mobs of them have been wrecking havoc in several parts of the country since the revolution, and they rhetorically declared war on “the Jews” a number of times.

“Last week,” Lellouche said, “they held a demonstration in Tunis on Habib Bourguiba Avenue. They called for the killing of Jews.”

“Were they referring to Israel, to you, or to both?” I said.

“This is the third time they called for the murder of Jews,” he said. “The first time, we thought they were speaking about Zionists. And the second time, we thought they were speaking about Zionists. After the third time, though, it was clear that they meant the Jews.”

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Former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak reportedly had a stroke and is on life support. Doctor's say he's "clinically dead."

The wrenching changes Egypt has been going through during the past year and a half may well have come to pass even if Tunisia hadn't kicked off the Arab Spring. Mubarak is old. His era wasn't long for this world either way.