Middle East

President Bush’s January 10, 2007, speech announced the “endgame” for Iraq. His new strategy is intended to salvage an American policy sharply undermined by rising violence in Baghdad and falling support in the United States. Bush coupled this change...

Mr. Turzanski led off, noting that the Report is more political than military. What may surprise or disappoint some is that it isn’t a strategy for victory, at least not in the conventional military sense. But the ISG came...

Democracy and Terrorism The United States wishes to use democracy in a double capacity, first to unsettle current enemies and second, through regime change, as a long-term inoculation against terrorism. Applied to terrorism in general and the Middle East...

The past few decades have borne out the warning made more than thirty years ago by Jacques Ellul, the French moral philosopher and sociologist, that the phenomenal development of mass media would revolutionize politics, with the flood of information...

Welcoming Remarks Walter McDougall opened the conference with remarks on the U.S. democratization effort in Iraq, noting similarities to Reconstruction in the Confederate South. Then, too, U.S. troops crushed an oppressive regime and occupied its land, the federal government...

On April 7, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a major address at The Johns Hopkins University. At the time, historian Barbara Tuchman writes, Johnson believed that to lose South Vietnam would be a catastrophe that would make the loss...

The debates among American strategists before both the first (1991) and the second (2003) Gulf Wars naturally differed, because strategic circumstances differed. But at least one common element—aside from the obvious fact that Iraq was the target of both...

What do George Clooney, Manute Bol, Elie Wiesel, and Olympic speed skater Joey Cheek have in common? They have all publicly called for the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 to be applied to Darfur and for greater intervention to...

In the run-up to the Iraq war, many of us reasoned that if a successful democracy took root, then this just might establish a model that would replicate itself throughout the region, forever altering the currently highly negative image...

Born circa 1966 in the Bedouin tribe of Bani Hassan in Zarka, Jordan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. air strike on June 7, near Bakuba, Iraq. Lately known as the “amir” of Al Qaeda in the...