ABSTRACT
Shortly after the 1991 Gulf War, the Mexican-American comedian Paul Rodriguez joked that war was God’s way of teaching geography. ‘Before the war in the Middle East,’ he confessed, ‘I didn’t know what the hell Kuwait was. I thought it was a fruit from New Zealand.’1 Rodriquez’s humorous observation captured the ethos of an American public that is often poorly informed about the wider world, but which, in moments of crisis, scrambles to make sense of its role in the global community. Rodriguez could also have pointed out that America’s wars abroad have acted as catalysts for tutorials in US diplomatic history. This is especially true with respect to the Middle East, where the pace of historical inquiry has largely followed the emergence of crises in such places as Palestine, Egypt, and Iran. This volume is itself testimony to the power of contemporary problems – in this case, the ongoing war in Iraq – to provoke scholars and the wider public to reflect more deeply on the historical background of crises in the Middle East.
