E-Notes

The major national security controversies over the last decade have revolved around intelligence. Critics blamed the intelligence community for failing to alert policymakers before the September 11 attacks, but others argued that the White House ignored intelligence that warned...

The “policy wonks” who assume high government office after an election rarely think about implementation. They act as if executing policies is a job for somebody else. At the very end of my book, I quote the famous line...

Ten years ago, Afghanistan was politically fractured, economically irrelevant, and socially repressive. The Taliban government, recognized by only three countries at the time, reduced the nation’s GDP per capita to under $170, almost completely destroyed public infrastructure, and ruptured...

The end of 2011 will mark a watershed in U.S.-Iraqi relations. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that the United States and Iraq signed in December 2008 calls for all American forces to leave Iraq by December 31, 2011....

In several respects, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington led to improvement in United-States-China relations. But what has been good for the U.S.-China relationship has not been as good for the United States and,...

Maritime chokepoints are among the most sensitive locations where geography, trade, and politics meet. The challenges posed by Middle Eastern chokepoints, in particular, were evident even before the massive dependence on oil of the twentieth century. These points have...

As my FPRI colleagues and I have written many times since September 11, 2001, the goal of terrorism is not total destruction and annihilation, but rather, disruption to achieve political leverage needed to bring about change. Osama bin Laden...

Thinking back to that awful September day in 2011, the first thing to come to mind is that given the rapid-fire series of simultaneous, systemic and symbolic attacks that was ripping across television screens (a tell-tale sign of Al...

When the Arab uprisings were just beginning in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011, few “experts” on the Middle East predicted the speed and extent of their spread. Still fewer analysts made analogies to the post-communist revolutions of 1989-91....

Introduction On March 27, 1979, Saddam Hussein, the de facto ruler and soon-to-be president of Iraq, laid out his vision for a long, grinding war against Israel in a private meeting of high-level Baathist officials. Iraq, he explained, would...