Christopher Dickey, "Newsweek"'s award-winning Paris bureau chief and Middle East editor, reports regularly from Baghdad, Cairo, and Jerusalem, and writes the weekly "Shadowland" column -- an inside look at the world of spies and soldiers, guerrillas and suicide bombers -- for "Newsweek" Online. He is the author of "Summer of Deliverance, Expats, With the Contras, " and the novel "Innocent Blood." He lives in Paris.
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As tension over slavery and western expansion threatened to break the US into civil war, the Southern states found themselves squeezed between two nearly irreconcilable realities: the survival of the Confederate economy would require the importation of mo... SEE MORE