Welcome

Welcome to andrewbutters.com. Please feel free to browse. You can review my published work, or, for less formal writing, my notebook is an occasionally updated collection of observations and anecdotes. You can also sign up to recieve email notifications of updates.



Recommended Reading

Can Arab Preppies Save the Middle East?

Time Magazine   October 2007

Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll in a Failing State

Time Magazine   September 2007

A Kind of Peace in Gaza

TIME Magazine   August 2007

Where Iraq Works

TIME Magazine   April 2007

Postcard from Lebanon: Keepers of the (Inner) Peace

Time.com   March 2007

Postcard from Damascus: The Actor’s Life in Exile

Time.com   February 2007

Watching Borat in Beirut

Time.com   January 2007

Disappointed in Lebanon

The Washington Post   July 2006

The Party’s Over

Time Magazine   July 2006

BEIRUT DIARIST: Oriental Sexpotism

The New Republic   May 2006

BEIRUT DIARIST: The Rioters and Me

The New Republic   February 2006

Babes in Kurdland

Plenty Magazine   March 2005

Losing Mosul?

Time.com   October 2004

The Times’ Man in Baghdad: John Burns Swears Off Tea

The New York Observer   June 2004

‘If you don’t get any birds, come and kill a cow’

The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.)   April 2004

--more--



The Notebook

The Second Coming of Bashar

Sun, May 27, 2007 | 3:58 pm

By Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus
Soldiers at the normally dour border crossing between Lebanon and Syria were dabka circle dancing and passing out candy. The streets of the Syrian capital were lined with tents stocked with tea and shawarma sandwiches. Billboards Proclaimed: We Believe in Freedom, We Believe in History, We Believe in You. Syrian state television […]

Explaining the Lebanese Jihadi Crisis

Fri, May 25, 2007 | 4:26 pm

By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut
Are you having trouble understanding what’s going on in Lebanon? Last summer there was war with Israel. All winter and spring the country has been in a political crisis between the government and Hizballah. And now all of a sudden there is some mystery jihadi group staging an uprising in a Palestinian […]

Woodward and Bernstein in Syria

Mon, April 16, 2007 | 11:56 am

On Friday night, I held a screening of All the Presidents Men — the Watergate movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford — for a group of Syrian and Palestinian writers whom I’ve been training to be journalists here in Damascus. As expected, they all got a few giggles out of the impossibly ideal conditions […]

Refugee Lessons

Thu, February 22, 2007 | 9:20 pm

Last week in Damascus, I accompanied a teenage Iraqi friend — the sister-in-law of a former translator of mine — as she enrolled in a private school for girls in the Old City. The occasion should have been cause for celebration. Zamzam and her family are refugees from Baghdad, where for over a year it’s […]

The American Embassy in Lebanon

Tue, February 20, 2007 | 9:28 pm

US Ambassador Feltman with with Lebanese-American Evacuees Last Summer
I went up to the American embassy yesterday to add more pages to my passport, and absent-minded as I am, was surprised to find it closed for Washington’s Birthday. Of course, it’s appropriate that State Department facilities abroad honor our first president, but all these holidays make […]

--more--

Warning: Missing argument 1 for query_posts() in /home/.embers/albutters/andrewbutters.com/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1361