Soon after 9/11, Michael Totten abandoned a profitable career as a technical writer and started a blog that took him throughout the Middle East, including Iraq which he visited seven times from 2006 to 2009. He also lived in Lebanon in parts of 2005 and 2006 in the middle of the Cedar Revolution, where I first met him. The characteristic Lebanese joie de vivre was further augmented with the hopefulness that came from forcing out Syrian troops after 29 years of occupation. Finally, the tiny country on the Mediterranean had a chance at peace, freedom and prosperity after decades of bloodshed. The problem was that some Lebanese, backed by Syria as well as Iran, wanted otherwise and pushed back against their neighbors in a campaign of bombings and assassinations. Totten’s account of the period, The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hizbollah, and the Iranian War against Israel , was published in 2011 and won that year’s Washington Institute for Near East Policy Silver Prize. I spoke with him recently about his latest book, Where the West Ends: Stories from the Middle East, the Balkans, the Black Sea and the Caucasus.
LEE SMITH: Most of your previous work including your first book, The Road to Fatima Gate, is about and situated in the Middle East. So why did you write a book about the West, or where it ends?
