Category: Writing and publishing

I put a couple more interesting posts onto the Re-engage book’s blog this week. This one has a fascinating map showing how, in a time of high oil prices, life in the exurbs becomes much more expensive than life closer in. (Hat-tip Paul Krugman.) This one deals with weighty issues around whether and how to eliminate nuclear weapons.
Also, I see that Scott MacLeod, the Cairo bureau chief of Time magazine, has written some nice things about Re-engage! on Time’s “Middle East” blog– here.
He writes:

Journalist Helena Cobban’s Re-engage! is a citizens’ manual with a broader agenda. Cobban feels that Bush’s invasion of Iraq has led to a strategic failure of a similar magnitude as the 1956 Suez crisis, which effectively diminished the global role played by once-great imperial powers Britain and France, and as the 1979 Afghanistan invasion, which helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Believing that the next American president has a new chance to put things right, Cobban calls for a revamped foreign policy of global inclusion to replace Bush’s unilateralism…

And this:

Since 2003 she has operated Just World News, a lively, informative blog on world affairs that is popular with specialists and non-specialist citizens alike. Just World News, like Re-engage!, is a good example of the role citizens can play in helping shape a new, better narrative for the Middle East and the world.

These comments are so kind. Thanks, Scott!
Further details about Re-engage!, including ordering info and a list of the upcoming book events, can be accessed through the book’s website.

My Re-engage! book has been getting a good soft roll-out already. But next week we have the first two significant launch events– one in Charlottesville, VA and the other in Washington DC. Then more will be coming along thick and fast.
The events we already have firmly scheduled are listed on this page on the book’s website.
If you live in NYC or Boston and have concrete ideas about launch events in either of those cities for next month, please let us know a.s.a.p!
Tony is kind enough to comment there,

I heartily recommend her book and her site [that’s JWN] to anyone seeking a more peaceful, constructive and cooperative relationship between the last superpower and the world that has long since slipped beyond its control.

the “Guest-blogging” gig I did about the book on Tony Karon’s excellent “Rootless Cosmopolitan” blog.

I have a big piece in the CSM today that urges Americans to build a relationship with the rest of the world on the basis of strong commitment to the ideals of human equality and nonviolent problem-solving. (It’s also here.)
If you go to the CSM website’s version, you can even here the audio of an interview my editor, Josh Burek, did with me on the subject.
My book gets a nice mention there.
In the article I note that human equality is a fundamental American value, and that the UN, which was a great American creation, is built on the ideas of equality and nonviolent problem-solving.
The piece is a gentle critique of the whole discourse of American “leadership”, which is the dominant discourse in Washington today. (How to regain it, after Bush has squandered it, etc.) Actually, if I’d dealt with the issue more thoroughly I would have noted that “leadership” can be exercised in a number of different ways and certainly need not involve the “leader” in question throwing its weight around. Moral leadership, shared leadership, and leadership that is dedicated primarily to effective team-building are all much more useful concepts of “leadership”, as such.
Anyway, tell me what you think…

Yesterday I got my hands on the first copies of my upcoming book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush. It is so exciting! Paradigm Publishers have done a fabulous job editing and producing it to a punishingly rapid schedule.
Those of you who have placed advanced orders for the book can now expect them to arrive pretty soon.
The official publication date is still May 15th. The folks at Paradigm and FCNL, and I, are all working hard to give the book a great launch, and then speedy and effective nationwide promotion. If you would like to help us with this, send me an email, as we’re still in the planning stage.
More details about the launch and promo events will be on the book’s website soon.

So here we are! The great folks at Paradigm Publishers told me my upcoming book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush went to press today– and we are now also launching the website for the book.
Here’s the cover:

And here’s the website for it.
It has been a thrilling project. Two weeks ago I got to hold a copy of “bound galleys” in my hand, and all the work and the crazy deadlines seemed worthwhile… That, even though the bound galleys were not yet the final version of the book. The cover looks a lot stronger now; the layout of the book’s 20 or so charts has been upgraded; the remaining typos have all (we hope) now been corrected; and various other small tweaks made.
It has been just a little over nine months since I first had the conversation with Jennifer Knerr and her colleagues at Paradigm that set the whole project in train. They have done a superb job– in editing, in production, in speed, vision, and every other respect.
The cover price is $14.95 and the official publication date is May 15. However, if they really have gone to press today then I imagine that finished copies should be available much sooner than that.
So okay, JWN readers, here’s where I would really love your help– especially if you live in the United States. Can I ask you to help us promote the book??
This is fairly urgent. The book will be out very soon now, and given the topic its optimal shelf-life may be fairly short: let’s say somewhere between nine and 18 months.
It has been written and produced to be as topical and up-to-date as possible. That means we need to hit the ground running promotion-wise. And I’ve a confession to make: I’ve been so busy writing and revising the book that I haven’t yet done as much as I’d wanted to, to set up promotion activities for it. Paradigm and the Friends Committee on National Legislation will be helping, but neither of them have the kind of deep pockets that the big New York publishing houses put into promoting their books. And anyway, this is much more of a citizen-based, grassroots venture.
So here are some ideas of how you could help us out with this:

* You can order a copy of the book (instructions at the second button down on the website’s left sidebar.)
* Or you could consider ordering three or four copies– they make great gifts for anyone you know who’s graduating high school or college.
* Could you go to your local bookstore and tell them how excited you are about the book? If you do, take in a couple of the fliers for the book, that you can download and print from the website. Order your own copy or copies of Re-engage! through the bookstore– and urge the bookstore to get in a load of additional copies, too.
* While you’re about it, you could print up a bunch of fliers and use them to help tell your friends and neighbors about the book…
* Would you like me to come to your town or community and gives some talks or speeches about the book? We are just working on some book-tour ideas right now. Best plan: scratch your head and think of as many local groups, colleges, organizations, and media outlets as may be interested in having me do something for them– any time between May and the end of the year. See if any of these groups could help with airfare or other expenses. Coordinate with my schedule early on. (Email me here.) I’m definitely thinking of doing a west coast tour in early fall… maybe try to hit Chicago and some midwest cities in mid-fall… and just about anywhere on the east coast is easy for me to get to in spring, summer, or fall.
* Could you write a review of the book for any media outlet with which you’re connected? Mention it in a Letter to the Editor?
* Of course, if you have a blog, or contribute to online discussions elsewhere, it would be great to get the book mentioned and discussed in the blogosphere as often as possible!

Well, y’all must have some other good ideas of how to get the word out, too…
By the way, the ‘Re-engage’ website has its own little blog attached to it over there. I’m not sure how much of my blogging I’ll be doing over there in the months ahead, and how much here. But check it out. I’m looking forward to having some good discussions over there, too.
But mainly, at this point– a big thanks for anything you can do to help get the work out about Re-engage! When you’ve had a chance to read it I’ll be really interested to hear your reactions.
(For now, though, at least you can go to the website and admire the fine set of blurbs the book has gotten from some very interesting people who have read it. Did I mention Lee Hamilton???)

My piece on Why Lebanon hasn’t slipped into civil war is in Friday’s Christian Science Monitor. (Here, and archived here.)
If you go to the first of those links, you can also hear my dulcet (?) tones in an audio interview (14 minutes; MP3 format) that Josh Burek, my editor there, conducted with me this morning on the same topic.
(Small technical note: I wish his sound editor had ramped my volume down a bit, as my voice sounds a little loud and breathy there. I was speaking on a regular phone, pacing around my sitting room here a little bit as I talked. Larger content note/ memo to self: I really must find something other than “Oh gosh” to say when someone asks me a question and I want to collect my thoughts before giving an answer. Maybe next time I’ll try: “Well, that is a great question… “)
Anyway, if you want to learn my explanation as to why dear, infuriating old Lebanon hasn’t slipped into civil war, you’ll have to go read the piece. But astute JWN readers would already have read an earlier take on this subject, here.
Also, check out this well-reported piece on the same topic by Michael Bluhm, that appeared in the Beirut Daily Star yesterday.

Interesting that the Economist recently used a quote from the portion of my January 16 interview with Khaled Meshaal that had been published on the Foreign Policy website, by agreement.
Hat-tip to eagle-eyed spouse for noticing that. (Okay, both of us tend to read our copy of the Economist fairly long after it lands in the mailbox.)
I’m still thinking about the intellectual property issues involved. Prima facie I would say the intellectual property rights to the quote reside with me. Perhaps with Meshaal himself? No. Because in granting me the interview, he was granting me the right to use his words– with, of course, due attribution.
Well, I gave (sold for a very small mess of potage, actually) some limited web-publication rights to FP. I would feel better about the Economist ripping me off if they had given even FP as the source, since then people would have at least known where to look for that portion of the longer interview. (The whole text of which, you can read here, btw.)
Well, it is true that the whole of the Economist is written and edited by a large gang of castrati who subsume their personas completely with that of their beneficent employer and never use bylines. So maybe they view questions of attribution and of ripping off other people’s work without attribution differently than the rest of humanity.
But still….
Anyway, FWIW I think they got their analysis significantly wrong in that article. They were trying to draw a clear distinction between Mahmoud Zahhar (= hardliner) and Khaled Meshaal (= not hardliner), and to stir up the idea that there’s a significant gap between their respective positions. I think they misunderstand the different roles the two men play.
But then, what do I know? All I am to them is an anonymous, quite rip-off-able nobody. And they are the new janissaries of the global era.

I’ve been pretty busy this week– including on a special project, see below. So though yesterday was my 5th blogiversary I completely forgot about marking that fact here. Darn!
It’s been quite a quinquennium. I am really glad I got into the blogging habit before the start of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, because now I have a somewhat full, though still of necessarily incomplete, record of many of the main portions of the war here– including of its last-minute preparations. My very first blog post, February 6, 2003, was a quick critique of Colin Powell’s notable (and, as it turned out, notably mendacious) presentation at the UN the day before. (Goodness, I mentioned there having read the whole text but I didn’t hyperlink to it! What was I thinking?)
In the next day’s post, five years ago today, I focused in on the claims Powell had made about Saddam having sponsored the presence in Iraq of sa network of Al-Qaeda supporters. In that one, I did hyperlink Powell’s text– and also, the text of a recently released Crisis Group report that had examined the whole phenomenon of that pro-Qaeda network (“Ansar al-Islam”) and said of the area in northern Iraq where they had been entrenched that, “This is a region outside Baghdad’s control and we see no evidence that Ansar has a strategic alliance with Saddam Hussein.”
Now, over the weeks ahead, I shall be thinking more about that whole period of the build-up to the war and way that so many Americans– but most especially the members of the political and media elites, and those who aspired to join them– got so badly caught up in war fever. Some of them even in spite of the conclusions they reached in their rational, analytical modes, that the war could well end up being a disaster.
It was an emotional time.
But I’ll also be remembering the way that so many of us here in US resisted getting caught up in the war fever. On February 16, 2003, I blogged about the huge antiwar demonstration I took part in, in New York the day before. That was a historic– and in retrospect, oh so tragic– moment.
Meanwhile, in Bushistan, the preparations to launch the war were getting near the “ready-to-go” point. Probably we should have encircled the Pentagon, instead.
Look where Iraq’s 29 million people, and the stretched-to-busting US military, and the US National Debt, and the families of 3,940 US service members killed and many thousands more badly wounded all find themselves today.
So say a prayer for wisdom and healing. And say a prayer for Sen. Barack Obama– a politician who notably got it right throughout all of those crucial, emotion-laden weeks of early 2003.
Here’s what Obama said during last Thursday’s debate:

“I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”

Go, Obama!
—
Finally, a quick word about my special project this week. Back in January 2003, it was my son Tarek who was the one who urged me, “Mom, you really should check out this blogging thing and get yourself a blog.” He then patiently helped me get JWN started, and he’s been my tech advisor here ever since. Tarek’s 30th birthday is coming up, so I’ve been making him a special present for it. [Obviously, I’m not about to reveal what it is. But it took more work than I’d been expecting… ]
Recently, Tarek became engaged to his fabulous girlfriend of some 3-4 years, and they will be married in July… Meantime, he’s working hard on completing a Master’s program at MIT… So we have a huge amount to celebrate and be thankful for.
Mazel tov, Tarek! Thanks for everything!