Anyone who has spent time in the Middle East has probably taken note of the abundance of conspiracy theories in circulation. Most Americans I know dismiss these theories as, well, crazy. Which makes it even more unfortunate when one of them turns out to be true. Iraqi officials respond to the news that the White […]
The Economist's Briefing this week is on Islamic finance. I’ll confess to being less than expert on economics and just link. Click here for the briefing on current successes and struggles in the field; click here for the summary of Islamic finance's history. Those interested in reading further on Islamic finance can check out Forbes.com's […]
The NYT has a piece on the disillusionment of Palestinians with the 2-state solution dream. It has, after all, been 15 years since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, and it can't be comforting to know that Olmert, Abbas, and Bush are hard at work – their combined approval rating probably hovers somewhere around […]
The pool of possible successors to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak became smaller today with the death of former minister of defense Abdel-Halim Abu Ghazala. The Associated Press is reporting that Abu Ghazala died late Saturday at age 78 (President Mubarak is 80). Field Marshal Abu Ghazala would not have been a real contender for the […]
Today, the Washington Post announced that the US government is spying on Iraqi President Nouri Kamal al Maliki. This revelation comes from Bob Woodward's forthcoming (Monday) book The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008. Phew. That is … surprising. The Post's early redux of Woodward's book also includes a bit of analysis related […]
An interview that you may find interesting. There is a story behind the interview. Maybe someday I will share it. Walid Jumblatt: It is important to have President Michel Sulayman convene the national dialog session to discuss the issue of the arms of Hizballah. It will take a long time to settle it, as it […]
Gian P. Gentile has a piece in the Christian Science Monitor this week arguing that the Russia/Georgia standoff of August 08 indicates the importance of maintaining a military with strong conventional warfare capabilities. A conventionally trained military can quickly adapt to a counterinsurgency environment, he says, but deemphasizing conventional preparations in favor of a focus […]
At a press conference in Damascus following a quadripartite meeting that joined Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy alongside Assad, the Syrian president commended the Doha Agreement, which he said had erased the specter of civil war in Lebanon. "Yet the situation in […]
Jeffrey Azarva at the American Enterprise Institute argues today that as Egyptian President Husni Mubarak continues to block democratic reform a new U.S. administration would do well to “send Mubarak and the one-in-three Arabs he rules the message that U.S. aid cannot be taken for granted.” Since the early 1980s the United States has provided […]
Raghida Dergham writes for al Hayat on the American presidential candidates and foreign policy from an Arab perspective. Quick excerpt: Rarely do the Democrats remember that global protests to American policies are not solely ascribed to the war in Iraq. They are equally ignited by the policies adopted by Democratic presidents in the past […]
Hady Amr, scholar at Brookings in Qatar, takes note in the Daily Star of the fact that, though Arabs make up 5% of the world's population, they took less than 1% of Olympic medals. (Of 958 awarded, only 9 went to citizens of Arab countries). In his words: … Something is clearly wrong when countries […]
… with, of course, emphasis on Iraq and energy. Richard Holbrooke, Ambassador to the UN under Clinton and an attractive candidate for Secretary of State under a Democratic administration (and a whole host of other things – see Wikipedia) has a piece in the September/October Foreign Affairs on the foreign policy challenges that either McCain […]
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