Human Trustees

[Thanks to my colleague Dan Varisco, anthropologist at Hofstra University, who posted a blog about this treaty on July 4, 2011 ] I’m writing here about 1797, when the third American treaty with a foreign nation was signed by President John Adams with the Dey of Algiers (officially, a regent of the Ottoman Empire; in practice, a warlord making his…

           Syria’s Ba’athist regime has a history of bloody crackdowns, especially at the hand of the current president’s father, Hafez al-Asad. Most infamously, he had 10 to 30,000 people massacred almost overnight in the city of Hama in 1982. No opposition could be tolerated by this secularist regime (likewise for Saddam Hussein, his Ba’athist neighbor), especially…