Bernard Lewis has been the single most influential, academically-based scholar of the history, religion, politics and present disorder of the Arab world. Now in his nineties and still productive, he has propounded a general interpretation of “What Went Wrong,” the title of one of his most important books, with the once-flourishing and now-disordered Islamic civilization. Here in 2004 he discusses with us – and in his words – “the roots of Arab rage.”

What’s Putin doing in the title? That’s to remind ourselves that if the first two items don’t totally exhaust our correlated capacities for worry, pessimism and despair, there’s always the reactivated cadaver of the Soviet Union to keep us in persisting dysphoria. There are Russianists and Russianists and lots of them still linger in Fukayamish optimism that at least the “cold war” ended years ago. A few of the best students of the present Russian reality think otherwise and have good and easily demonstrable reasons. One is David Satter who has appeared here on two of our earlier podcasts. Another is Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University who recorded this conversation with us just before the emergence of the ISIS and Ebola nightmares.

Here then is his properly pessimistic reading of Putin and the anti-democratic culture from which he comes and by which he and his happy army of kleptocrats are sustained. In other words, when the Ebola scourge has passed and Islamic Jihadism has finally been brought down to a manageable level, the Russian threat to eastern European societies will still be there and may have done them a good deal more damage than Ukraine has already sustained.

It remains a contentious issue in military history but, probably, the British outfit called the “Special Air Service” was the beginning. It was put together at the time of the Falklands war between the UK and Argentina and then went on to secret missions in Asia and all over the Middle East. One of the original SAS fighters, Andy McNab, tells the tale and recounts some truly daring assaults and escapes in this 2002 conversation.

Ideas do indeed have consequences and the ideas that flow from University-based Middle East Studies Centers often have strong pro-Arab, anti-Israeli influence in policy-making sectors of the State Department and the White House itself.  According to Martin Kramer, one of the few Israeli policy scholars who has ever served in such institutions – always as a visitor funded by extra-university sources – this is true over all the western world but particularly in the United States.For many years head of strategic studies at Tel Aviv University and now President of Shalem College in Jerusalem, he joined us together with Charles Lipson of the University of Chicago for a discussion of the connection between Muslim jihadist extremism and the views expressed within this sector of American academia, up to and definitely including the new decapitation-prone “Islamic State.”

Yeltsin opened the files in 1992. The first  American who got full access was Harvey Klehr. Here in 2003 we discuss with him the evidence of Soviet penetration of the American government and its full management of the American Communist party. This is not loose “McCarthyism” but, rather, effective if delayed counterespionage. Of special interest is the way in which American historians turned blind eyes until Klehr’s book appeared.