Now We Are Ten!

As we noted at the beginning of this year, the first issue of The Estimate was a “zero issue” published on February 24, 1989. A “zero issue” is a publisher’s tool for marketing a proposed new publication, a “sample” as it were. The response was encouraging, and The Estimate began its biweekly (fortnightly) publishing on April 14, 1989, with Volume I, Number 1. The current issue (Volume XI, Number 8, that of April 9) is the one closest in time to our actual start date, so we are taking this opportunity to note the occasion. Those of you who regularly search our site at www.theestimate.com will recall (if you are old enough at least) how meaningless such an address would have seemed in 1989.

When The Estimate began, the world was a very different place. The Berlin Wall would fall soon, but the old Cold War world still prevailed. There were two superpowers. The Middle East was still dominated by old dinosaurs and dictators such as Saddam Hussein, Hafiz al-Asad, Mu‘ammar Qadhafi — well, perhaps things haven’t changed that much.

The Estimate was founded by your present editor, Michael Dunn, and Julia Ackerman (now Julia Ackerman Glenister), an Asian specialist. Initially, it sought to cover both the Middle East/South Asia and the Far East (or East Asia), which may have been an overly ambitious effort: our hope was that the technology-intensive Far East and the energy-intensive Middle East would converge in ways which they did not. Julia ultimately went on to other things and a different career, and The Estimate eventually limited itself to the Islamic world “and its neighbors”, the Middle East and North Africa, Central and South Asia and the Caucasus.

When we began publishing, our printer, Deadline Press in Washington, lectured us frequently on the transient nature of the newsletter, on how many — including those founded by senior officials and prominent names — fell by the wayside in their first three or six months. Deadline Press tells us today that we are their longest surviving newsletter, having survived those of many national Embassies in Washington. Whatever we’re doing, we must be doing something right, because we’re still here.

From time to time in our 10th year, we will offer excerpts from “The Estimate 10 years ago”, but we will seek to include our wrong prognostications as well as our right ones. On the other hand, we’ve been right often, which has helped us survive. That April 14, 1989 issue had a Dossier devoted to “Iran’s Latest Power Struggle: A Scorecard of the Winners and Losers”. Though Khomeini was alive the title could still be used (it would not work badly for the story on Page Two of the April 9, 1999 issue, for example).

To those of our readers who have been with us from the beginning: many thanks for keeping us alive. To those who have found us only in recent years: please keep reading us. Newsletters usually have short lives; The Estimate has survived for a decade and is growing stronger. We owe that to loyal readers, and we are grateful for it. 

New Feature—The Estimate’s Free Article Archive

Articles that have appeared on this web site now are available in a chronological archive, and are searchable using the same search engine used to search The Estimate’s full collection of back issues.

Access that archive here.

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