Hezbollah-Lebanon's "Party of Allah"-wears many faces. Founded by Muslim clerics following Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, it is a powerful political party, a Shia Islamic religious and social movement, Lebanon's largest militia, and a close ally of Iran. Originally, Hezbollah's reason for being was to resist the Israel invaders. Over time, it grew from a small militia to a paramilitary group more powerful than the Lebanese Army. Trained and...

In January 2006, Palestinian voters shocked the Western world by giving Hamas a majority of seats in the parliamentary elections. Stunned Westerners found it hard to imagine how the blood-soaked Islamist terrorist organization won the support that brought it to power. Western thinkers found it harder yet to envisage how a Hamas government would play a positive role in Palestinian-Israeli relations. Hamas, an acronym for an Arab phrase meaning "Islamic...

A new kind of war came to America on September 11, 2001. It came on the silver wings of four Boeing jet liners. Middle Eastern hijackers turned four commercial aircraft into flying bombs. Two jets smashed into the twin towers at New York City's World Trade Center. A third rammed into the Pentagon in Virginia's Arlington County. And a fourth crashed short of its intended target in a remote Pennsylvania field. Almost 3,000 people died on that bright...

In 1946, the Vietnamese people began fighting for independence from the French colonial rulers of their land, which at the time was known as Indochina. By the mid-1950s, the French had been defeated, and separate governments were set up in North Vietnam and South Vietnam pending elections to unify the country. Those elections never took place. The American government supported South Vietnam, wanting to prevent the spread of communism from North Vietnam....