Foreign Affairs committee  Right now, for whatever reasons, and they're very complicated, intellectual life in the Middle East, Pakistan, and places like that in Islam has not really had a chance to develop for any number of reasons: colonialism or authoritarian regimes. I was at a meeting several years

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm not sure of that. I think you put your finger on something important in that something is happening in the Muslim world. It's not just the Middle East, although the Middle East tends to be an engine that runs a lot of it. I think it's more of a conflict of perceptions, actu

Foreign Affairs committee  I think what you mentioned is extremely important. A lot of times I get the feeling that a lot of effort is going into restoring the status quo ante. That is not sustainable. What needs to be done...and I also have to say that we have to be very careful. I was being interviewed

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, I think it's very important. One of the problems in the Middle East is that, yes, there needs to be construction and things like that, but even prior to that, there needs to be the emergence of a civil society there. Otherwise, you just go from movable refugee camps to more

Foreign Affairs committee  The area of the world that we refer to as the Middle East is probably a lot more complex than most of us realize. For one thing, its present state did not evolve naturally. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which basically had controlled most if not all of the Middle East, ba