Middle East conflict

Journalist Philip C. Winslow has worked for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, ABC radio and CBC radio.

But he hasn't always been a journalist: His new memoir, Victory for Us Is to See You Suffer, chronicles the time he spent working with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the West Bank. It was during the second Palestinian intifada, during which Winslow transported aid across checkpoints to villages and refugee camps.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine. He has written in depth about the Bush administration. His article in this week’s edition (“Shifting Targets”) is about the administration’s shift in position on Iran, redefining the war in Iraq as a strategic battle between the U.S. and Iran. Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004, in a series of articles published in the magazine early in 2005. He has been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and a dozen other prizes.

A foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Yaroslav Trofimov traces the beginning of the global jihad to Nov. 20, 1979.

It was the first morning of the new Muslim century, and hundreds of fundamentalist gunmen seized Islam's holiest shrine — the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The event and its ringleaders have since inspired militants, including al-Qaida.

Trofimov is also the author of Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu.

In The Deadliest Lies, Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman responds to The Israel Lobby, arguing that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's work "serves merely as an attractive new package for disseminating a series of familiar but false beliefs" about Jews and Israel.

In The Israel Lobby, which grew out of a controversial 2006 article in the London Review of Books, Stephen Walt and co-author John Mearsheimer examine the impact of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy. They argue that American support for Israel cannot be fully explained on either strategic or moral grounds.

Walt teaches international affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Journalist Frances Harrison has been the BBC's correspondent in the Iranian capital city of Tehran for the past 3 years. She says conditions have gotten worse, especially for women, under the increasing strictures being put in place by the ultraconservative Islamic government. Harrison's husband is Iranian; prior to her posting in Iran, she reported for the BBC from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Malaysia. She's now back in the U.K.

Malcolm MacPherson's new novel is Hocus POTUS, a political farce about the shenanigans of White House loyalists in Baghdad's Green Zone, written from the point of view of an American journalist stationed there. The book draws on MacPherson's own experiences as a foreign correspondent for Time and Newsweek magazines, during which time he reported from Baghdad on Ambassador Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority.

"There is a madness in Gaza now." So says New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Steven Erlanger, who joins Terry Gross to talk about the Palestinian power struggle that's erupted recently and how the battles between the Hamas and Fatah factions are affecting life in the West Bank and Gaza.

Erlanger has reported from all over the world, serving in Moscow, Bangkok, Prague and other cities. Prior to his tenure at the Times, he wrote for The Boston Globe.

It's been a year since the start of last summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah. We'll discuss life in Lebanon, and the conflict's unintended consequences, with Timor Goksel, former spokesperson and senior adviser for the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon. Goksel now teaches at the American University of Beirut.

Russian arms dealer Victor Bout has armed Islamic extremists and sold weapons to some of the Third World's most abusive and murderous dictators and warlords — and he's known for fueling both sides of conflicts.

His success is rooted in the legacy of the Cold War, whose messy unraveling left him with easy access to massive inventories of weapons and ammunition built up by the Soviets. We talk about Bout with journalists Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, who've co-written a book about him: Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible.