ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AFP/Getty Images

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said today that the Russian military is "gaining in strength and power like all of Russia."

To prove it, he marched troops, tanks, and Topol-M nuclear missiles around Red Square today. The event was reportedly planned as early as January, and Medvedev was so intent on making the Soviet-style show of prowess a success that he ordered Russia's air force to make sure no clouds rained on the festivities. So they carried out a cloud seeding operation in advance of the parade. Meant to mark the 63rd anniversary of the victory of Nazi Germany, it was the first parade of its kind in Red Square since 1990.

It is right to consider the images coming out of the parade as a bit disconcerting. But press reports from the scene seem a bit over the top, with stories of "glamorous" troops and "mixed messages." This ignores the realities of today's Russian military. Moscow-based defense analyst Pavel Falgenhauer provides a good reality check:

Russia still has large stocks of Soviet-made military hardware; most of it fully or partially out of order. Only a handful of ships, tanks, and jets are truly operational at any given time.... The task of reviving defense hardware parades on Red Square will face grave technical and logistical problems and in any event will most likely produce only a pathetic imitation of Soviet military grandeur.... One can only hope that ...  no ancient building will collapse as tanks and ICBMs roll into central Moscow to serve the vanity of Russia’s leaders."

Let's not get carried away with the Cold War nostalgia just yet.

Nikola Solic-Pool/Getty Images

Saddam Hussein may have been A-okay exterminating thousands of Iraqi Kurds and destroying the oil economy of an entire country, but apparently life in prison was a little more than his hard shell could handle.  

The pan-Arab paper Al-Hayat (English version of its news site here) has printed excerpts from the prison diaries of Iraq’s prolific former dictator, written during his stint in custody between 2003 and 2006. In his prison time writings, Saddam describes the hardships he faced, including the personal struggle of asking for things -- like the time he asked for a flower. "It was a serious sacrifice from me to ask for the first time in my life,” he wrote.

Also, while he probably should have been more concerned about his impending execution, Saddam's main worry was actually contracting an STD . . . from his clothesline. Upon learning that his laundry was hung on the same line as the clothes of his U.S. military guards, he wrote:

I explained to them that they are young and they could have young people's diseases…  My main concern was to not catch a venereal disease, an HIV disease, in this place… What can the Americans and other invaders... bring to an (invaded) country apart from dangerous diseases?"

I knew the man was backward, but how early '90s -– if you can’t get AIDS from a toilet seat, you surely can’t get AIDS from a clothesline.

Sean Gallup/Getty Images News

A crane swings over the skeleton of the former Palace of the Republic (Palast der Republik) on April 24, 2008 in Berlin, Germany. The Palace of the Republic is the former parliament building of the former East Germany, and is to be completely disassembled by the end of the year. Many Berliners are against the move, citing the historical importance of the building.

I loved the film Good Bye Lenin! as much as the next guy, but sometimes you just have to move on. I mean, we are talking about a significant eyesore here, and one that's in a prime riverfront spot:

JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images

JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images

Thanks to the likes of Napster, modern-day piracy is often associated more with ripped files than riptides. But according to this week's Tuesday Map, modern-day pirates still roam the high seas –- at least off the coast of Somalia.

This integrated satellite map, created by UNOSAT (the Operational Satellite Applications Program of the UN Institute for Training and Research) shows reported incidents of pirate attacks and hijackings off the coast of Somalia between January and November of 2007 (highlighted in red orbs) as well as incidents in 2005 and 2006 (not highlighted).

Somalia, ranked third in the 2007 Failed States Index, has been in a rough patch ever since the 1991 fall of President Said Barre. For more than two decades, it remained loosely governed and divided by warlords. Then, back in June 2006, a group of Muslim clerics, leaders, and businessmen called the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) took control of Mogadishu and installed an Islamic extremist leader, challenging the legitimacy of Somalia's U.N.-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Seven months later, the TFG, with the help of neighboring Ethiopia, retook the capital city and much of the South. The TFG's resurgence was also supported by American commandos, sent in to take out suspected al Qaeda terrorists.

Given this rocky track record, Somalia's coastal chaos would seem to reflect its internal instability. But according to UNOSAT's figures (see the chart included in the pdf map), piracy actually subsided during the UIC period, a time otherwise reported as bearing a striking resemblance to the Taliban regime.

Perhaps there's a fatwa against eye patches?

This week’s Tuesday map comes to us from a billboard controversy south of the border.

Created by advertising agency Teran/TBWA and launched a few weeks ago in Mexico, the Absolut billboard ad depicted pre-1848 North America -– before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo turned Mexican territories into what is now the American South West.

The campaign was obviously intended for a Mexican audience, as Favio Ucedo, creative director of a top Latino advertising firm, explained:

Many (Americans) aren’t going to understand it. Americans in the East and the North or in the center of the county -- I don’t know if they know much about the history… Probably Americans in Texas and California understand perfectly, and I don’t know how they’d take it.”

But Absolut quickly learned just how some Americans would take it: not well.  Although the ad never appeared in the U.S., it was picked up by American media outlets, causing a flurry of complaint from U.S. citizens (some more creative than others).

As of Friday, Absolut’s maker Vin & Spirits had decided to withdraw the apparently offensive advertisement even though it "was based upon historical perspectives and was created with a Mexican sensibility... [and was] in no way was meant to offend or disparage, nor...advocate an altering of borders..."

If you want to wrap your head around Russia's current attitude in the world, you have to understand the Russian view of three key periods: the breakup of the Soviet Union, the chaos of the 1990s, and the so-called color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. Dmitri K. Simes ably deals with the key issues here, but I just want to highlight this insightful quote about U.S.-Russian relations in the 1990s:

We haven't played everything brilliantly with these people; we haven't figured out how to say yes to them in a way that balances off how much and how often we want them to say yes to us. We keep telling Ol' Boris [Yeltsin], "'OK, now here's what you've got to do next – here's some more shit for your face.'"

–Bill Clinton to Strobe Talbott, 1996

Blake Hounshell is Web Editor of ForeignPolicy.com. He has been blogging this week from the Salzburg Global Seminar session on Russia: The 2020 Perspective.

David McNew/Getty Images

We've just made this piece by current Republican nominee John McCain from FP's Summer 1996 issue available for free. Titled "Imagery or Purpose: The Choice in November," it was written as an endorsement of '96 Republican candidate Bob Dole's foreign-policy platform. (Then Senator Tom Daschle wrote on behalf of Bill Clinton.)

What's striking about the piece -- rediscovered deep within the cavernous FP archives thanks to the National Security Network -- is how much of it could have been written today. Among the issues McCain discusses are North Korea's nuclear program, democratic backsliding in Russia, expanding NATO, turmoil in the Balkans, and the threat of an emerging China. McCain attacks Clinton for indecisiveness, inconsistency, and an "inclination to seek solutions to problems that merely postpone their worst consequences."

It's also worth noting that the piece comes from the period between the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, when McCain is said to have shifted from an intervention-skeptic to a neoconservative hawk. In light of this transformation, it's interesting that McCain's primary criticism of Clinton is the latter's ideological capriciousness:

The president is quite skillful at discarding one identity for its opposite. His success at reinvention is a testament to the astonishing ease with which he appropriates the arguments of his critics and then lays claim to first authorship.

Spoken like a man who's never run for president.

Hillary Clinton and her misstated trip to Tuzla have made headlines in the United States of late, but in the Balkans, it's all old news.

Back in early January, a former member of the Bosnian presidency, Kresimir Zubak, was reported to have called her story of her arrival in the Bosnian city, sniper fire and all, completely false (article here if you read Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian).

Clinton's Tuzla trip came under further attack by the Bosnian Serb political leader Mladen Ivanic -- although Ivanic had a different account of Hillary's motivations than did the Obama camp. He explains (text in Serbian):

Given that the world, and especially America, associate the activity of snipers shooting at innocent civilians exclusively with Serbs as 'the bad guys,' Hillary Clinton has sent a clear signal as to kind of foreign policy she would hold towards this part of the Balkans. The Serbs would still be 'the bad guys,' while the Bosniaks and the Croats would be 'the good guys.'"

It's no surprise a Bosnian Serb would beat Sinbad to the punch on this one. After all, it was Clinton's husband who led the push for NATO's 1995 airstrike on Bosnian Serb targets. But these Balkan denouncers were so quick to jump on Clinton's story that they seem to have gotten a few facts wrong themselves. Zubak argues that Clinton did not actually arrive in Tuzla until December 22, 1997. According to Clinton's official schedule for March 25, 1996, released by the National Archives, Clinton did in fact visit Tuzla in 1996 -- just in time to meet an eight-year-old Bosnian girl and a 7th-grade class adopted by Germany.

KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty Images

The Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy recently made available "Saddam and Terrorism," a Pentagon-requested report conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses. The five-volume report analyzes captured Iraqi documents for connections between Saddam and terrorist organizations. The document was declassified earlier this month, but was made available only in CD form.

According to FAS:

The five-volume report affirmed that there was "no 'smoking gun' (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda." But it also said there was "strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism."

In light of the report's mixed findings, Warren Strobel of McClatchy Newspapers writes:

The new study appears destined to be used by both critics and supporters of Bush's decision to invade Iraq to advance their own familiar arguments.

Three of the report's five volumes consist of hundreds of pages of the translated Iraqi documents. For those of you not up to the challenge, FAS has pulled out the highlights, which include this peculiar gem:

One of them, a fifty-page Iraqi "intelligence" analysis, disparages the austerely conservative Wahhabi school of Islam by claiming that its eighteenth century founder, Ibn 'Abd al Wahhab, had ancestors who were Jews. In what must be the only laugh-out-loud line in the generally dismal five-volume report, the Iraqi analysis states that Ibn 'Abd al Wahhab's grandfather's true name was not "Sulayman" but "Shulman."

"Tawran confirms that Sulayman, the grandfather of the sheikh, is (Shulman); he is Jew from the merchants of the city of Burstah in Turkey, he had left it and settled in Damascus, grew his beard, and wore the Muslim turban, but was thrown out for being voodoo."

Robert Spencer/Getty Images

Critics of Republican presidential nominee John McCain often point to his inconsistent stance on military intervention as a sign that he is not the straight-talking maverick he presents himself to be. An examination of McCain's stances on intervention, however, reveals not mixed signals but a steady transformation of worldview. The young Vietnam vet who once vocally opposed military overreach has become the elder statesman who passionately advocates the need for military action. Here's a look at the stances McCain has taken on some of the major U.S. military operations of the past few decades.

Lebanon

Stance: As a freshman congressman, John McCain broke with President Ronald Reagan and most of his party to oppose invoking the War Powers Act to extend the deployment of U.S. peacekeepers in Lebanon.

Statement: "The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave. We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there in the first place." Sept. 29, 1983

Iraq (Operation Desert Storm)

Stance: McCain worried about the prospect of an extended deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq and hoped to limit the U.S. action to a bombing campaign.

Statement: "If you get involved in a major ground war in the Saudi desert, I think support will erode significantly. Nor should it be supported. We cannot even contemplate, in my view, trading American blood for Iraqi blood.'' Aug. 19, 1990

Somalia

Stance: After a failed operation that led to the death of 19 U.S. soldiers, McCain proposed cutting off funding to the U.S. mission in Somalia in order to force the Clinton administration to bring the troops home. He later wrote that he regretted this stance.

Statement: "I'll tell you what can erode our prestige Mr. President. I'll tell you what can erode our viability as a world superpower, and that is if we emesh ourselves in a drawn-out situation, which entails the loss of American lives, more debacles like the one we saw with the failed mission to captured Adid's lieutenants using American forces and that then will be what hurts our prestige." Oct. 14, 1993

Haiti

Stance: Like most congressional leaders at the time, McCain opposed sending U.S. troops to Haiti in 1994 to assist the return of exiled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide back in power.

Statement: "I don't think our vital national security interests are at stake... In Haiti, there is a military government we don't like. But there are other governments around the world that aren't democratic that we don't like. Are we supposed to invade those countries, too?" July 10, 1994

Bosnia

Stance: McCain initially strongly opposed intervention in Bosnia, but after the signing of the Dayton accords in 1995, he changed his stance and cosponsored a resolution supporting the U.S. peacekeeping mission.

Statements: "If we find ourselves involved in a conflict in which American casualties mount, in which there is no end in sight, in which we take sides in a foreign civil war, in which American fighting men and women have great difficulty distinguishing between friend and foe, then I suggest that American support for military involvement would rapidly evaporate." April 23, 1993

"Our troops are going to Bosnia. Congress should do everything in our power to insure that our mission is truly clear, limited and achievable, that it has the greatest chance for success with the least risk to the lives of our young men and women. The resolution that the majority leader and I have offered does not ask senators to support the decision to deploy. It asks that you support the deployment after the decision had been made. It asks you further to condition your support on some important commitments by the President." Dec. 13, 1995

Kosovo

Stance: McCain not only favored the use of force to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, but pressed the Clinton administration to send ground troops into Serbia.

Statement: "If we lose this war, the entire country and the world will suffer the consequences. Yes, the President would leave office with yet another mark against him. But he will not suffer that indignity alone. We will all be less secure. We will all be dishonored.'' May 9, 1999

Afghanistan

Stance: McCain strongly supported the U.S. operation to defeat the Taliban and attempt to capture Osama bin Laden.

Statement: "[W]hat we need to understand is that we may have to put large numbers of troops into Afghanistan for a period of time, not a long period of time, but for a period of time, in order to effectively wipe out these terrorists' nests and track down Mr. bin Laden. In other words, it's going to take a very big effort, and probably casualties will be involved, and it won't be accomplished through air power alone." Dec. 28, 2001

Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom)

Stance: McCain has been among the most vocal supporters of the initial invasion of Iraq and last year's troop surge. His stance on these issues has largely defined his presidential run.

Statement: "Only an obdurate refusal to face unpleasant facts -- in this case, that a tyrant who survives only by the constant use of violence is not going to be coerced into good behavior by nonviolent means -- could allow one to believe that we have rushed to war... Our armed forces will fight for peace in Iraq -- a peace built on more secure foundations than are found today in the Middle East. Even more important, they will fight for the two human conditions of even greater value than peace: liberty and justice. Some of our soldiers will perish in this just cause. May God bless them and may humanity honor their sacrifice." March 12, 2003

Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

It's been a bad news cycle for Hillary Clinton. After ABC News rushed to discover whether the former first lady had been in the White House on blue-dress day, other news organizations scoured the 11,000-plus pages released by the National Archives for evidence of Clinton's expansive claims about her foreign-policy experience in her husband's White House.

The Guardian sniffed around her scheduling records and found, on an "initial reading," that Hillary wasn't always exactly an eyewitness to power:

On the day that dozens of US cruise missiles rained down on Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country's onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, first lady Hillary Clinton was far from the White House war room: instead she was touring ancient Egyptian ruins, including King Tut's tomb and the temple of Hatshepsut. And on the day before the signing of the Good Friday agreement in Belfast she was at an event called "Hats on for Bella" in Washington.

Ouch. I wonder, though, what if we had we discovered that the former first lady was in the Situation Room with Sandy Berger and Wes Clark, pointing out bombing targets on a map? That wouldn't have played well, either.

MARWAN NAAMANI/AFP/Getty Images

Al Kamen reports that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is meeting with Lebanese Maronite leader Samir Geagea, a key player in the so-called March 14 forces that comprise the current, embattled govenment. Kamen's item reminded me of the chill that went down my spine when I passed by Ehden, a town in Lebanon's beautiful Qadisha Valley, back in 2005. Here's an excerpt from the Lonely Planet book on Lebanon & Syria:

In one of the most notorious events of the war, Samir Geagea of Bcharré amassed several hundred militiamen, went into the home of Tony Franjieh (son of President Suleiman Franjieh) in Ehden and proceeded to kill him and his entire family as they slept. While this was explained by political differences between the two families, in fact it had its roots in a feud between the Geageas and the Franjiehs, which dates back to the 19th century. At that time, according to local (Bcharré) lore, a Geagea woman was killed by two Ehden men after offering them water and food. In response Bcharré's residents burden down the town of Ehden and killed many of its inhabitants.

Geagea maintains he was framed by the Syrians, but it seems fairly well established that he was at least involved, if not directly responsible for Franjieh's death. It should also be noted that the Franjieh clan has plenty of blood on its hands, too. Such is Lebanon.

U.S. Department of Defense

Newt Gingrich is a big tease. I attended a talk by the former House speaker and FP contributor at the American Enterprise Institute on Wednesday titled, "What if Reagan Had Not Run and the Soviet Union Still Existed?" Given Gringich's penchant for alternative history, I was anticipating apocalyptic scenarios of President Ted Kennedy ceding Alaska to the Soviets while American schoolchildren were memorizing passages from Das Kapital.

Instead, Gingrich's presentation was largely a discussion of the power of political rehetoric. This month marks the 25th anniversary of two of Reagan's key speeches, the March 8th "Evil Empire" speech and the March 23rd speech announcing the creation of the Strategic Defense Inititiative. Gingrich feels that these two speeches set the stage for the Soviets' collapse:

Here he is, simultaneously in the same month [...] boldly setting out two great principles of dismantling the Soviet empire. First we're going to boldly take it on by delegitimizing its authority because it's evil. And why should something that's evil have authority. Second, we're going to start a race involving science and technology that the Soviet Union cannot possibly win. As a bold set of insights, they're remarkable. The fact that they worked, I would argue, is indisputable. Yet, at the time, they were so radical that almost no one could have accepted them.

Gingrich's larger point was that "none of the people who were wrong in the 1980s have learned anything." He feels that liberal elites in the U.S. media, state department, and academia still favor appeasement and relativism toward America's enemies over Reagan's aggressive moral clarity, which is why they avoid giving Reagan credit for winning the Cold War. I would argue that this isn't as radical an opinion as Gingrich thinks. (Even the dreaded New York Times grudgingly included it in Reagan's obituary.)

But leaving aside the multitude of reasons for the Soviet collapse and the strong evidence that decades of containment weakened the USSR more than Reagan's confrontation, it's clear that the Gipper played a crucial role in hastening events. If anything, Gingrich's analysis actually sells him short. Gingrich focuses only on the bellicose rhetoric of Reagan's first term, not the more conciliatory actions of his second. He doeesn't mention Reagan's many meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, including the 1986 negotiations in Iceland where the U.S. president nearly agreed to abolish his nuclear-missile force. Reagan clearly respected Gorbachev and felt that negotiation with such a rival was not an act of moral compromise. In doing so, he spurned the neoconservatives in his administration who viewed these overtures as tantamount to appeasement.

If aggressiveness and moral clarity were all that it took to defeat tyranny, democracy would have flowered in Cuba decades ago. The real takeaway lesson of Reagan's Soviet strategy is that confrontation only works if combined with constructive engagement. It's a lesson that many of those who idolize him have yet to learn.

ROBERT ATANASOVSKI/AFP/Getty Images

Greek prime minister Costas Karamanlis said today that his country will block Macedonia’s entrance into the EU and NATO if the country does not change its name. Macedonia expects an invite to NATO at the organization's summit in April and could possibly start EU negotiations this fall.

So what’s wrong with “Macedonia”? According to Greece, the name belongs to its northern region, an area that covers what was once ancient Macedonia back in the glory days of Alexander the Great (and they were glorious). Greece claims that use of “Republic of Macedonia,” as Macedonia calls itself in its constitution, not only violates Greece's historic cultural claim to the name, but also suggests territorial ambitions. Instead, Greece, and the U.N. by default, have continued to call Macedonia by the outdated name “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” ever since Macedonia declared independence from Yugoslavia seventeen years ago. It’s an awfully long name for a tiny country, but you can call it FYROM for short.

Speaking between rounds of negotiations between Skopje and Athens, Karamanlis said:

I want to be very clear on this. The intransigence of our neighbor is dashing its ambitions to join NATO and the European Union. If there is no settlement, the neighboring country cannot aspire to join NATO. Our position 'no solution-no invite' is clear."

On Tuesday, U.N. envoy Matthew Nimetz proposed five name alternatives: Constitutional Republic of Macedonia, Democratic Republic of Macedonia, Independent Republic of Macedonia, New Republic of Macedonia and Republic of Upper Macedonia.

Clearly, these choices were not satisfactory to Macedonians because riots broke out on Wednesday over the prospect of tampering with the country’s constitutional name. With Greece still hung up on a name from the third century B.C., Serbia's 1389 claim to Kosovo suddenly seems more reasonable.

iStockPhoto

Q: Who was Adolf Hitler?

• A German kaiser
• A munitions maker
• The chancellor of Germany during WWII
• An Austrian premier

If you answered "C," congratulations! You are now as smart as one quarter of 17-year-olds in the United States.

A new survey released by the non-profit group Common Core found that teenagers in the United States live in "stunning ignorance" about history and literature. That's something we could have told you awhile ago. In "Lost in America," a feature story in the May/June 2006 issue of FP, Douglas McGray wrote:

[S]urrounded by foreign languages, cultures, and goods, [young Americans] remain hopelessly uninformed, and misinformed, about the world beyond U.S. borders."

In his piece, he writes that we hear all the time about how America's youth lags behind in science and math tests. But they lag equally, if not more, in the liberal arts and social sciences. And it's just as dangerous. As the world becomes more and more globalized, it's crucial that our citizens today and tomorrow have a deeper understanding of history and culture.

Thankfully, Common Core has taken on this cause. The organization is composed of both Democrats and Republicans, who may not agree with each other about education reform policy. But they do agree on one thing: America's schools need to teach more about the liberal arts. Right on.

ADALBERTO ROQUE/AFP/Getty Images

Raul Castro has run Cuba ever since his brother Fidel fell ill in the summer of 2006, so Fidel's announcement today that he is stepping down after nearly 50 years in power is largely symbolic. That said, Fidel continued to pull political strings from his sickbed, and his statement today suggests that he still intends to voice his opinions on matters of state.

FP has long been host to debates on Castro's legacy and what a post-Fidel Cuba might look like. With Raul at the helm, today will look much like yesterday. But Raul is also 76 years old. The machine is surely in motion to find ideological heirs to the Castro brothers.

Don't miss:

Was Fidel Good for Cuba? Ignacio Ramonet of Le Monde Diplomatique squares off against columnist Carlos Alberto Montaner over Castro's true legacy.

The Day After: Cuba What happens when Castro falls? (Also in this special package: the day after Kim Jong Il, Mugabe, and Qaddafi.)

Seven Questions for Brian Latell The former CIA analyst and author on what life in Cuba is like under the younger Castro brother.

Seven Questions for Carlos Saladrigas The businessman and outspoken Castro critic discusses Fidel's decline and his homeland's future.

What America Must Do: End the Embargo Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer's advice to the next American president.

USAToday's "OnDeadline" blog finds some choice morsels from newly released transcripts of Henry Kissinger's 1973 meeting with Mao:

You know, China is a very poor country," Mao is quoted as saying during the exchange. "We don't have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands."

The Chinese leader drew laughter when he returned to the proposition a few minutes later. "Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you 10 million." he said, adding: "We have too many women ... They give birth to children and our children are too many."

It's not clear whether Mao is at all serious -- he was a pretty crazy dude, after all -- but Kissinger's response is precious:

It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it.

If you haven't yet read "A World Without Islam," the cover story for our January/February 2008 issue, you really should. Graham Fuller, the former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, has penned a sweeping, thought-provoking essay that has already turned a lot of heads in the United States and beyond. Fuller takes a hypothetical question—What if Islam had never existed?—and walks us through an alternate history of the world as if Mohammed had never founded the third major monotheistic religion in the seventh century.

It's an intriguing thought experiment. With no Muslim faith, would Christianity rule the globe? Would the Middle East today be democratic and free? And the big question, of course: Would the attacks of Sept. 11 never have happened? The answer, according to Fuller, is none of the above. Wipe Islam from the sands of time, he says, and we'd wind up largely in the same place we are today.

Fuller, now an adjunct professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, is chock full of knowledge and insights on Islam and the Middle East and is eager to hear reactions to his essay. Send us any questions you have for him by this Friday, Jan. 25, and we'll publish his answers here on Jan. 31.

iStockphoto.com

For some reason, my mom always told me that fortune cookies were invented by Jews from Brooklyn. I have no idea where she got that from. And it turns out she was wrong. But her main point was right: that fortune cookies were not Chinese, never were Chinese, and never would be. Go to China, and what's for dessert? Fruit! Go to Taiwan, and what's for dessert? More fruit! Fortune cookies are a pure American invention. They caught on in Chinese-American restaurants. But they aren't Asian.

Or are they? It turns out that fortune cookies have their roots in Japan, not China. According to the New York Times's Jennifer 8. Lee (who, natch, has a book coming out in March, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, about Chinese Americans and food), a Japanese scholar named Yasuko Nakamachi has dug up evidence that fortune cookie-shaped biscuits were crafted by hand near a temple in Kyoto as early as 1878. They made their first appearance in California in the early 1900s, possibly brought over by Japanese immigrants, and then were co-opted by Chinese immigrants. Nakamachi suspects that it happened because Japanese immigrants often owned Chinese "chop suey" (also American, not Chinese) restaurants in the United States during the first part of the 20th century. Chinese owners then took over the restaurants when the Japanese were rounded up and placed in internment camps during WWII. It wasn't until the 1950s that they became popular throughout the United States, after cookie-makers learned how to mass-produce them.

The funny thing is, in discussions of inter-Asian rivalry, many Chinese often complain that elements of Japanese and Korean culture actually stem from China, if you go back far enough. Now we've got a modern Chinese-American food that actually stems from Japan. But the most important question for Nakamachi and Lee is: Who decided it would be fun to tack on the words "in bed" to the end of every fortune?

Who killed Benazir Bhutto?

We may never know for sure, but it is certainly a good sign that Pakistan is turning to Scotland Yard for investigative help. Pakistani officials quickly blamed Beitullah Mehsud, a Pashtun tribal leader with ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda, but their bungled and conflicting announcements about Bhutto's cause of death have only deepened suspicions in Pakistan and abroad about some kind of cover-up. The U.S. intelligence community is reportedly withholding judgment. British investigators could help clear up some of those questions. Still, with the crime scene immediately swept clean and Bhutto in the ground, the best forensic evidence will probably not be available to them.

It's therefore likely that Bhutto's assassination will join that of former Lebanese PM Rafiq al-Hariri as an "unsolved mystery." (We're now on our third U.N. special investigator in the Hariri case, with very few little to show for it.)

Here's a photo of the two leaders from 1994:

AFP/Getty Images