Middle East

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....

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...

What began as the Arab Spring, and is now being referred to as the long Arab Summer due to its inconclusive aftermath, has been commonly perceived by the media and academia as an indicator of al Qaeda’s downfall. The...

Foreign Policy  Jordan unveiled a package of constitutional amendments last Sunday which offered the most drastic overhaul of the 1952 constitution ever proposed. King Abdullah promised these revisions on June 12 in a surprising televised speech. The new push...

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....

On June 30, after a lengthy and much delayed investigation, the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) finally issued the indictments of four individuals accused of having been involved in the plotting and execution of the assassination of Lebanese...

Though Iraq has faded from the prominent place it held only a few years ago in American foreign policy circles, the current Iraqi political scene is extremely tense. Violence and corruption have not subsided as much as some had...

Wasat al-Balad Demonstrations No Arab state has been able to ignore the sweeping changes of the Arab Spring. It has dominated the Arab language news, and changed the perceptions of millions about what is politically possible. Yet in each...

Abstract In a penetrating profile of Saddam Hussein, the author concludes soberly that “Saddam’s harm will long outlive him. Iraq, too important to be left alone, yet too convoluted to be understood by outsiders, will take decades to recover.”...

Abstract Written shortly after King Fahd of Saudi Arabia’s death, this profile takes the measure of the man: “Profligate though he may have been, Fahd never forgot that Saudi Arabia was a rich place with a small army in...