Eastward to Tartary [antikvár]

author's noteg Balkan Ghosts, to which the first part of this book is a sequel, was kS a portrait of the Balkans at the end of the 1980s that tried to anticipate the problems there in the 1990s. likewise, Eastward to Tartary portrays the Greater Near East at the turn of the twenty-first century, and looks forward to the next decade of so in that region."Should we intervene?" That is the question often asked in crisis situations. This book, like Balkan Ghosts, offers no answers, but describes the lay of the land. Because foreign policy, when it is serious, is guided by necessity and not by sympathy, a landscape, however grim, will never deter the seasoned policy maker from intervention if an abiding national interest coincides with a moral one. Indeed, it is only the grimmest human landscapes that demand interventions in the first place.Frederick the Great used to tell his generals, "He who defends everything defends nothing."1 Likewise, he who writes about every place in a vast region writes about no place. A book that dealt with every country from Morocco to Indiathe extent of the Near East, according to some definitionswould be unwieldy. My aim here is to record a journey, not to write a comprehensive survey. Some readers will be surprised not to find Iran and Iraq in this book. I wrote about Iran at length in The Ends of the Earth and about Iraq in TheArabists, and felt it would be more useful to introduce Americans to countries like