Middle East

AbstractWriting this profile after Yasser Arafat’s death in 2004, the author argues that Arafat’s career was a monument to Western weakness and ineptitude in dealing with international terrorists.This essay was originally published in Peacefacts: A Briefing on the Middle...

This profile was originally published in FPRI’s Peace Facts: A Briefing on the Middle East Process in July 2000. Read the full article here....

Abstract King Hussein had come to embody his country and bequeathed a much more robust state than the one he inherited, the author argues. This essay was originally published as an FPRI Peace Facts: A Briefing on the Middle...

Abstract The Arab-Israeli conflict is a part of the regional puzzle, the author contends, but not the key to the regional puzzle in the Middle East. He further cautions that U.S. interests in the Middle East will not be...

Abstract Shortly after Barack Obama’s victory in November 2008, the author addressed the “old realities” of U.S. interests and challenges in the Middle East, as well as the “new policies” the president-elect may choose to establish in this “perpetually...

The journalistic notion of an “Arab Spring” is faulty on two counts.  Climatologically, from Morocco to Yemen, it is absurd; there is no such season.  It is also misleading, because analogy with the “Prague Spring” of 1968 runs into...

On May 11, 2011 hardliner cleric, Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, held a meeting with members of the conservative Islamic Coalition Party. Mesbah-Yazdi warned his audience against the strengthening of deviant religious thought in Iranian society. He claimed that it jeopardizes...

Democracy Digest However much President Obama wants to support the democratic thrust of the Arab spring, strategic considerations place real constraints on his policy options, writes Sean Yom. But there is scope for shifting the threshold of what is...

A rebel firebrand defends the revolution that he led against the ruler and his system—in Egypt’s ancient past.  Many of his words, however, could almost be heard today: “History remembers the elite, and we were from the poor–the peasants,...

Osama Bin Laden: The Edison of Islamism by Lawrence Husick Osama bin Laden is dead and buried at sea. Barely 12 hours after the President’s announcement, pundits are comfortably speaking of the man in the past tense. Many are...