Over the past week, Israel has hosted many services, speeches and events in honor of former Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin. The national hero and Nobel Peace Prize recipient was assassinated 13 years ago by Yigal Amir, a Jewish extremist who opposed Rabin's peacemaking work.

Israel's top politicians used the occasion to highlight messages of peace. One Israeli soldier, however, appeared to be less than riveted while attending a memorial ceremony earlier this week, showing his lack of interest with what his Air Force base commander deemed a "disrespectful act": a yawn. Apparently, he didn't even cover his mouth. 

The faux pas came during the commander's own remarks. So loud and disruptive was this yawn that the commander paused for a "few minutes." This display of disinterest earned the soldier 21 days in jail.

But does the punishment fit the yawn? 

The soldier's mother doesn't think so. The woman recounted the episode to Israel Radio, saying that she'd raised her son on Rabin's legacy and that he wasn't being disrespectful, he was merely tired.  

But, if Rabin's memory impresses any lessons on those in the company of our boorish yawner, especially now as elections approach and peace negotiations hang in the balance, perhaps it's that peace requires superhuman energy and staying power.

Rest up, Israel. There's much work ahead.

When Rwanda's chief of protocol, Rose Kabuye, stepped off a plane in Frankfurt Sunday, she was greeted with an arrest warrant. Kabuye and eight other associates of current Rwandan President Paul Kagame have been indicted by a French court for inciting genocide.

The row between France and Rwanda is about as ugly as a diplomatic feud can get. Rwanda accuses France of supporting the 1994 genocide that left 800,000 dead. France accuses Kagame of inciting the genocide in a bid to win power. Diplomatic ties have been hopelessly severed.

So where does the truth lie?

The timeline looks pretty straightforward: French troops defended and funded the Hutu government of former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana in the years leading up to the genocide. In 1993 those troops left, but when the killing of the Tutsi minority spun out of control, the French again sent soldiers. This time the French "Operation Turquoise" carried a U.N. mandate to create safe humanitarian zones meant to guard the civilian population.

But Rwanda's current government begs to rewrite the details. A two-year investigation with hundreds of witnesses released this August found that more than 30 French government officials were involved in arming Hutu militias and planning the genocide. French troops used the safe humanitarian zones to help Hutu genocidaires escape. The French government was allegedly motivated by a near-paranoia about protecting a pro-French Hutu government from a n Anglophone Tutsi regime.

Then there is the French version: Paul Kagame, a former Tutsi rebel group leader, sparked the genocide of his own volition so that he could come to power.

That is all complicated enough, but here's the messy bit: Both sides probably tell some piece of the truth. The Rwandan investigation is robust and damning, and the French at least raise a good point that Kagame has proven something of an authoritarian in office, with a whole list of human rights abuses under his watch.

Think this is all just ancient history? Think again. The conflict following Rwanda's genocide never ended -- it just moved next door.

Twenty-five years ago this week, a truck laden with explosives crashed through the security gate surrounding the compound housing the U.S. Marine presence in Beirut. The suicide bomber drove straight into the lobby of the Marine barracks and detonated explosives equivalent to 12,000 pounds of TNT. The force of the explosion collapsed the building, killing 241 American servicemen.

The bombing entered the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign when John McCain bragged that he stood up to President Ronald Reagan in opposing the deployment of the Marines to Beirut because he believed "that a few hundred Marines in a situation like that could not successfully carry out any kind of peacekeeping mission."

The American "peacekeeping" in Lebanon failed because the United States never realized that there can be no such thing as peacekeepers in a country where there is no peace to keep. The Marines equated peacekeeping with supporting President Amin Gemayel, himself one of the major sectarian players in the civil war. But the more that the United States propped up Gemayel, the more they were pushed into conflict with Lebanese Druze and Muslim groups. To this day, the Marine barracks bombing remains a reminder of the dangers of getting involved in other people's wars, even with the best of intentions.

The repercussions of the attack continue to this day, both for the United States and Lebanon. The Marines did not step on Lebanese soil again for more than two decades, when they returned to help Americans evacuate during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war.

For the Lebanese, the truck bombing marked the birth of a new form of assymetrical warfare, where small insurgency groups began to discover the weapons that would allow them to take on a militarily advanced superpower like the United States. The Marine barracks bombing was the mother of future terrorist attacks, from the World Trade Center attacks to suicide bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan, that have shaped warfare for the past generation.

I think it's hilarious that moderate Republicans like former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, former White House spokesman Scott McClellan, and former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson all decided to endorse Barack Obama this week now that Colin Powell has weighed in and the Democratic nominee appears poised for a crushing victory on Nov. 4.

It's kind of like when Italy declared war on France in June of 1940, four days before the Germans took Paris. Or maybe it's more like when Italy declared war on Germany in 1943, a full year and a half before the Germans actually surrendered. I can't decide which.

Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

Former FP Managing Editor Carlos Lozada has a great piece in Sunday's Washington Post, "An Extremely Abridged History of the George W. Bush Presidency."

Over the course of a few weeks, Lozada, now the deputy national editor at the Post, collected some of the best vignettes and quotes from the surprisingly many memoirs of the Bush years that have already come out. Together, they serve as a kind of "alternate history" of the past seven years.

My favorite bit is FP contributor and former White House speechwriter David Frum recounting Bush's conservationist streak:

The energy issue stirred not only Bush's hawkish patriotism, but his ancestral puritanism. After finishing a speech practice in the Map Room one afternoon, he pointed with exasperation at a table lamp and demanded: "Do you think it's going to occur to anybody to turn that lamp off when we leave the room?" And he walked over and flicked it off himself. It vexed him to look out the windows of the White House family quarters before sunrise and see the Executive Office Building bright with lights that had been carelessly left burning overnight.

Be sure to check out Short Stack's article preview as well, which finds Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and former imperial viceroy Coalition Provisional Authority chief L. Paul Bremer offering inconsistent accounts of Bush's famous Thanksgiving appearance in Iraq.

Was George W. Bush too preoccupied with the mess in Mesopotamia to focus on things like education, healthcare, and the economy? Responding to reader questions about his FP cover story, "Think Again: Bush's Legacy," David Frum says no:

I have often written that I don't believe that George W. Bush ever had a well-considered domestic agenda. So in that sense, no, Iraq did not distract him.

Read the rest.

Today, Sept. 17, is the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Camp David Accords. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin met with U.S. President Jimmy Carter at Camp David, Maryland, for 13 tense days -- from Sept. 5 to Sept. 17, 1978 -- to hammer out the agreements that led to the March 26, 1979, peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Under the terms of the treaty, Israel agreed to withdraw from Sinai, Egypt agreed to allow Israeli ships to traverse the Suez Canal, and the two agreed to establish normal diplomatic relations.

Carter and Sadat on Sept. 6, 1978	Carter and Begin on Mar. 26, 1979
Of course, those days weren't the last time Carter met with the leaders of Egypt and Israel. Here are a couple recent shots of the former president, still at it:
With Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Apr. 17, 2008	With then-interim Israeli PM Ehud Olmert on Jan. 22, 2006

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Heritage Officer Nick Herepath views the remains of a Roman hypocaust hidden beneath a Spud-U-Like outlet on September 11, 2008, in Chester, England. The Roman hypocaust heated part of a Legionary bath house above the streets of Chester. The hidden treasure is one of hundreds of sites opened for Heritage Open Days, an event that celebrates England's architecture and culture by offering free access to properties that are usually closed to the public or normally charge for admission.

UPDATE: Here's what the shop looks like above.

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux has give us permission to post the following excerpts from After 9/11: America's War on Terror (2001- ), by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón. A self-described "work of graphic journalism" by the same folks who put together the visual adaptation of the 9/11 report, the book is a very cool way to look at what's happened over the past seven years.

Below is a vignette from the book, which shows the Bush administration shifting its focus from Afghanistan to Iraq:

Click here to see the rest of this series.

This is shocking:

A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 17 nations finds that majorities in only nine of them believe that al Qaeda was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Check out this graphic:

Among the many interesting findings here is that Palestinians are actually much less prone to conspiracy theories than Egyptians and Jordanians. Maybe it's because they have a more educated population, a freer press, and a less oppressive government. Egyptians tend to believe the opposite of whatever their government tells them. 

But wow, what's wrong with Mexico and Germany?

KIM JAE-HWAN/AFP/Getty Images

There's something your taekwando teacher never told you. Turns out the sport's global body, the International Taekwando Federation (ITF), was once infiltrated by North Korean spies and assassins.

For the last 34 years, Choi Jung-hwa, the son of ITF founder Choi Hung-hi, has lived abroad, guarding the family secret. The father fell out with the South Korean regime in the 1970s, fleeing to Canada. But it was his son who was recruited, along with other master fighters, to assasinate then South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan in 1982. Luckily, the plot was foiled Now, Choi Jung-hwa is back in South Korea for the first time in decades to recount the tale.

While he was away, a new World Taekwando Federation was founded and adopted as the Olympic standard. So even if Kim Jong Il is out on sick leave for now -- reports today suggest the leader might be quite ill indeed -- make sure that it's the WTF that you sign up for at the gym.

MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP/Getty Images

Silvio Burlusconi's appearance with Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi over the weekend seemed to be a historic first: the Italian prime minister formally apologized and agreed to offer financial compensation for decades of colonial occupation. An elaborate ceremony -- complete with the repatriation of an ancient statue of Venus that had been relocated to Rome -- marked the signing of a "friendship and cooperation agreement" between the two countries.

Yet it wasn't a completely altruistic measure for the Italians, who stand to benefit from their "reparations" to the former colony:

“We have written a page in history. Now we will have fewer illegal immigrants leaving from the coast of Libya and coming to us, and more Libyan oil and gas,” declared Mr Berlusconi, according to Italian reports

Indeed, the $5 billion Italy will pay in annual installments of $200 million will largely come in the form of investments in Libyan infrastructure. While the agreement marks the first time a former colonial power offered compensation to an Arab country, special economic ties between former colonies and mother countries are, of course, nothing new.

The question now is whether Italy will follow suit with its other, less resource-rich, former colonies like Ethiopia and Eritrea.

ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images

Whenever a new conflict breaks out somewhere in the world, commentators like to trot their old favorite whipping boy: Francis Fukuyama's much-misunderstood essay-turned-book, The End of History and the Last Man.

"See! History hasn't ended," they say, pointing to the September 11 attacks or Russia's war with Georgia or the latest dire situation in Somalia.

Of course, many of these commentators have probably never actually read Fukuyama's argument, which uses the word "history' in a very particular way -- it's History with a capital "H," as in the process of dialectical change, the grand sweep of big ideas and economic trends that Marx talked about. In Marx's estimation, communism was the logical ideological end point of this process, but Fukuyama saw "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government" in the long run. He never believed that everything would be all gum drops and lollipops.

As Fukuyama told FP in an "epiphanies" interview in the current issue:

THE MOST MISUNDERSTOOD THING [about my idea, the “end of history”] was the word ‘history.’ People thought I was saying that nothing was going to happen after the Cold War.

And if you haven't read it already, check out Fukuyama's very smart essay in this Sunday's Washington Post -- a nice counterpoint to all the hysteria about whether we are entering a new age of autocracy. "While bullies can still throw their weight around, democracy and capitalism still have no real competitors," he writes. I see no reason to believe he is wrong.

massacremap.com

The makers of this week's map want to remind visitors to Beijing of the violent history lurking behind the glitz and glamor of the Olympic Games. Freedom House's Ellen Bork along with the Weekly Standard's design director Philip Chalk and Tiananmen survivor Tian Jian have created this map for Beijing tourists interested in visiting the sites of the June 4, 1989 massacre of the Tiananmen Square protestors. Each number shows the place where where one of the 176 victims were killed or the hospitals to which their bodies were taken.

You can find information on the victims here and read Bork's explanation of the map at the New York Sun's site.

This isn't the first time the world has looked on sympathetically while Georgia was trounced by Russia. Does this sound familiar?

The President of the Georgian Republic has made an appeal to the League [of Nations] and sympathetic reference to his country's efforts was made by M. Paul Boncour in the Assembly. But it is realized that the League is incapable of rendering material aid, and that the moral influence which may be a powerful force with civilized countries is unlikely to make any impression on Soviet Russia. -The Times. Sept. 16, 1924

Here's Wikipedia on Georgia's "August Uprising."

The Hoover Institution, the conservative-leaning think tank located at my alma mater Stanford University, is finding itself in a bit of hot water over some 7 million pages of Baath Party records that both Iraqi and American archivists now say were taken by an "act of pillage" and must be returned to Iraq immediately.

The documents came to Stanford as part of a deal with the Iraq Memory Foundation, a nonprofit group run by Kanan Makiya (above left) -- an Iraqi exile known for his outspoken advocacy for the war in Iraq. Makiya, who stumbled upon the documents during the invasion's nascent period in 2003, maintains the information they contain is too dangerous for general view because they explicitly mention individuals who collaborated with the Hussein dictatorship:

This was not stuff for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to have access to," he said in a recent interview. "This stuff was dynamite."

While the last thing Iraq needs is more dynamite, this episode is yet another example of the United States and a certain cabal of Iraqi exiles thinking they know what's best for the country. As long as there's a reasonable enough guarantee that the documents will be safe, I agree with Jon Weiner's op-ed in Friday's Los Angeles Times: "It's up to the Iraqis to decide what to do with them."

RAVEENDRAN/AFP/Getty Images

With all eyes on China this week, it's refreshing to see George and Laura Bush noting that today is the 20th anniversary of pro-democracy protests in Burma that were brutally suppressed.

Last fall's Saffron Revolution was the probably the closest the country has come to mass protests since that fateful day when hundreds of thousands of Burmese took to the streets to call for democracy: 8.8.88.

The Irrawaddy, the best source of news on Burma, has a special issue today commemorating the '88 uprising. They are reporting that many people in the capital donned black clothing to mark the anniversary today, and that plainclothes police were out in force. All the while, conditions in the delta where Cyclone Nargis hit hardest remain dire, with little to no government or foreign aid coming through.

AFP/Getty Images

Yesterday, a shorn and shaven Radovan Karadzic faced his first day in court at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The Karadzic arrest has been hailed as a pivotal turning point in Serbia's path to EU cooperation and accession. But although Karadzic was captured in Serbia, his crimes were in creating the ethnically divided state that is Bosnia. And in Bosnia today, the story remains less than comforting.

In a compelling call for a revitalization of international efforts in the still-fractured country, Paddy Ashdown, former head of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, explains:

Bosnia's predominantly Serb entity, Republika Srpska, Karadzic's creation, has seen the vacuum where will and policy should be. Its premier, Milorad Dodik, is now aggressively reversing a decade of reforms. He has set up the parallel institutions and sent delegations to Montenegro to find out how they broke away….

Meanwhile, in European capitals the growing view goes like this. We invested 13 years of hard work and huge resource in Bosnia. Now it is stable and peaceful and we are rather tired. Kosovo has proved it is possible to divide a country. What matter if Bosnia becomes another Cyprus?…

This is folly of a very dangerous order. What happens to the Muslim populations who have moved back to Republika Srpska, even to Srebrenica, if they are handed back to an exclusively Serb-dominated regime? What happens to Bosnia's shining star, the multi-ethnic, markedly successful sub-entity of Brcko, hemmed in by Republika Srpska? Is it to be handed over, too? I do not believe Bosnia is likely to go back to conflict; most of its people are just too war-weary. But the one event that could change that calculation in favour of blood would be to return to the old Karadzic/Milosevic plan to divide Bosnia.

But minus those few returnees and that one "shining star," Bosnia is divided, functioning largely as two separate, ethnically split states. Yes, it's a sad fact -- one that U.N. peacekeepers allowed to materialize between 1992 and 1995, and one that any international efforts will be hard pressed to undo.

It's no wonder the celebration over Karadzic's arrest in Bosnia has been short-lived. For as Bosnian novelist Aleksandar Hemon concludes in an excellent NYT op-ed, "Justice is good, but a peaceful life would have been much better."

Osama bin Laden once said that his goal is "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy." Maybe he should have gotten into the mortgage business instead of becoming a terrorist.

Zubin Jelveh blogs a new IMF working paper by Hui Tong and Shang-Jin Wei, who look at the responses by economic forecasters and consumers to 9/11 vs. their reactions to the subprime mortgage crisis. As you can see, everybody pretty much shrugged off 9/11 (at least when it comes to the economy; emotional grief is, of course, beyond measure) after about six months, but subprime has brought a steady decline in confidence:

AFP/Getty Images

This week's arrest of the Bosnian-Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic has made headlines almost as big as those announcing the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic back in 2001. The shocking photos of Karadzic disguised as a bearded Dr. Dabic have painted the whole story ridiculous; statements from Brussels highlighting the arrest as a milestone trumpet the news that Serbia has really chosen a European future; and re-reported accounts from Bosnian Muslim victims have added an element of remorse for the fact that justice had not been brought sooner. But a lesser story today, that of Dinko Sakic, illustrates the long-term significance of Karadzic's overdue arrest.

Sakic, the last living commander of Jasenovac, the Croatian World War II concentration camp, died this week. Long after fleeing to Argentina, where he lived a rather vocal life in support of Croatian nationalism, Sakic was eventually tried and found guilty of killing thousands of Serbs and Jews -- but not until 1999, decades after his crimes were committed and years after those very crimes were used by Croat and Serb leaders alike to stir up nationalist fervor and inter-ethnic fear during the last bloody days of Yugoslavia.

Fortunately the losses at Srebrenica and Sarajevo will not go the way of Jasenovac, whose significance and death toll still remain in question. Thanks to the work of the ICTY, the former Yugoslavia's crimes of the 1990s have been investigated and documented in great detail, leaving far less room for future finger-pointing and fear-mongering. And with the EU promising future membership to all the countries of the Western Balkans, they'll need all regional stability they can get.

For more reflections what Karadzic's capture means, check out FP's interview with Richard Holbrooke, the man who did as much as anyone to bring peace to Bosnia. He's thrilled:

I got the news on a train from New York to Washington. I’ve rarely been so excited about any news event in a positive sense. The world gets so much bad news, and to bring this man to justice, this terrible man, ranks right up there with capturing Saddam Hussein.