With Troop Pledge, New Demands on Afghans President Obama’s commitment Tuesday night to redouble America’s campaign in Afghanistan left unanswered what is perhaps the most decisive question of all: will the Afghans step up too?
In ordering the accelerated deployment of 30,000 fresh American troops to the country,...
Chilcot inquiry told UK did not consider Iraq regime change before 9/11 British officials decided not to get involved in talk about regime change in Iraq in 2001 even though some parts of the new Bush administration began to discuss the possibility two years before the invasion, the opening hearing of the UK inquiry into the war heard today.
But Whitehall was,...
Netanyahu Says Swap of Prisoners Is Uncertain JERUSALEM — Seeking to lower expectations of an imminent deal with the Islamic group Hamas to exchange a captured Israeli soldier for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, (…) Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that no agreement had yet been reached. (…)
His [Benjamin Netanyahu]...
Egypt's House of the Rising Son It is a strange kind of republic in which presidents serve for life. It is an even stranger one in which rulers inherit power from their fathers.(…) The dissolution of the Egyp¬tian monarchy in 1952 marked a turning point in Egyptian politics, ushering in military control and...
World Citizen: The Middle East's Latin America Battles Middle Eastern diplomacy has intensified enormously in recent months, but don't expect to see peace break out any time soon as a result of that new burst of activity. That's because the latest wave of diplomacy has surfaced in a most unlikely place: South America.
In November alone, Brazil is...
A Chance for Turkish-Kurdish Peace President Obama's trip to the Middle East has created goodwill for him and the United States in the Islamic world. Much of what he promised in his historic speech in Cairo will take a long time to fulfill. But there is one place where his influence could be used for immediate and important...
Don't Assume Ahmadinejad Really Lost There is no denying that the news clips from Tehran are dramatic, unprecedented in violence and size since the mullahs came to power in 1979. They're possibly even augurs of real change. But can we trust them? Most of the demonstrations and rioting I've seen in the news are taking place in north...
Peace Talk Without Peace Vision (...)The Sunday night speech at the Begin-Sadat Peace Centre at Bar Ilan University spotlighted a leader [Benjamin Netanyahu] quintessentially focused on a single target - political survival: survival between conflicting challenges - that from a U.S. President who wants a...
Iran: Ahmadinejad Victory Sparks Protests and Claims of Fraud According to Iran's Interior Ministry, Ahmadinejad took 62.6 percent of the vote, with leading reformist candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi receiving 33.7 percent – thus averting a widely anticipated run-off. The ministry says turnout was a record 85 percent of eligible voters.
The weekend...
U.S. to Join Talks on Iran's Nuclear Program The United States said yesterday that it would directly participate "from now on" in international talks with Iran over its nuclear activities, the latest move in the Obama administration's promised diplomatic outreach to the Tehran government.
"There's nothing more important...
Israel's War Crimes For the first time since the establishment of Israel in 1948 the government is facing serious allegations of war crimes from respected public figures throughout the world. (…) To grasp the significance of these developments it is necessary to explain what made the 22 days of attacks in...
U.S.: Military Dominance in Mideast Proven a Costly Myth The arguments for maintaining a major U.S. combat force in Iraq at least through 2011, escalating U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and assuming a confrontational stance toward Iran appear to assume that the United States remains the dominant military power in the region.
But the...
Iraq's Elections: Winners, Losers, and What's Next The Iraqi local elections were held on 31 January 2009 (...). The results, most of which were released on 5 February, offer important evidence into current political trends.
The outcome has two especially striking aspects. First, the trouncing of the principal ruling parties - the Islamic...
Iran's Anti-Secularist Backlash Millions of jubilant revolutionaries greeted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the senior Shia cleric, when he ended 14 years in exile and returned to Iran (...) from Paris on February 1, 1979. (...)
On his first day back, Khomeini delivered a message of hope and change to Iranians.
He praised...
Gaza Is No Warsaw Ghetto Within days of the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, critics of the war, on blogs and in the mainstream media, began to compare the situation of Palestinians in Gaza to that of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War.
In the last few years comparisons between the Israeli...
