The Costs of Relying on Aging Dictators

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - June 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments Almost as soon as it started, the democratization agenda that the Bush administration hoped would be the lodestar of its post 9-11 foreign policy has been all but shelved. The insurgency and sectarian bloodshed in Iraq, the regional threat posed by an expansionist Iran, and the Palestinian civil war have combined to help resurrect the U.S. embrace of regional stability as a foreign policy priority and have convinced President George W. Bush to reduce his emphasis on transformative diplomacy.

 


Tactical Hudna and Islamist Intolerance

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - June 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments The use by Westerners of the word hudna highlights an anomaly. Whenever journalists, diplomats, or commentators covering the Middle East use a non-English word, it will almost always be Arabic or perhaps Persian; seldom do they use any Hebrew words. Never has a U.S. or British newspaper, for example, used the Hebrew word for cease-fire (hafsakat esh). This is odd as Israel is the other side to these cease-fires.

 


Does Foreign Aid Fuel Palestinian Violence?

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - June 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments On December 17, 2007, eighty-seven countries and international organizations met in Paris and pledged to provide $7.4 billion over three years to the Palestinian Authority[1] (PA), an amount far in excess of any previous level of U.S. or European aid to the Palestinians. The conference participants justified the aid as a means of providing "immediate support to the entire Palestinian population,"[2]

 


European Converts to Terrorism

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - June 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments Conversion to Islam among native Europeans is on the rise. Many converts live at peace within their native societies; some convert only for marriage, and reject neither contemporary culture nor Europe's Judeo-Christian values. A minority, however, embraces radical interpretations of Islam and can pose a security risk. The involvement of Muslim converts in recent terrorist attacks has raised concern in Europe about these "converts to terrorism."

 


The Rise of the Chechen Emirate?

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - June 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments Chechnya has been at war with Russia for generations. By 1999, when the second Chechen war broke out, two resistance groups had emerged: nationalists and jihadists.

 


An Israeli Watershed: Strike on Syria

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - June 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments On the morning of September 6, 2007, Israel Air Force (IAF) planes penetrated deep into Syrian airspace and attacked a nuclear facility near the town of Dayr al-Zur in the northeastern part of the country. In an almost unprecedented fashion, the Israeli government and military refused to confirm the involvement of Israeli aircraft, the target, or the raid's success, with the first report of the operation coming from Damascus.[1]

 


Review of Kurdish Identity: Human Rights and Political Status

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - June 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments The reader of Kurdish Identity, published in 2007, will find himself reading such timely insights as former State Department Iraq coordinator Francis Ricciardone explaining that, "Of course, we have no relations at all with [Baghdad]," and former deputy assistant secretary of state David Mack writing that he understands both Kurdish aspirations and "the potential danger that a ruthless regime in Baghdad poses," as though Saddam Hussein's regime had not ceased to exist in 2003.

 


Review of Islam and the Everyday World: Public Policy Dilemmas

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - June 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments Jurists in most Muslim countries continue in their rulings to hew to antiquated formulations of Islam, enforcing a crippling separation of the Muslim world from modern, globalized states that rely on secular law to guide their relations with the outside world.

 


Review of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - June 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments The dramatic polarization of American politics has led leftist critics of the Bush administration to assume that Iran's Islamic Republic cannot be all that bad if President George W. Bush describes it as part of an "axis of evil."

 


Ending Londonistan

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - June 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments Preface by Melanie Phillips In February 2008, Gwyn Prins, a professor at the London School of Economics, and Robert Salisbury, the marquess of Salisbury and a privy counselor, published a breakthrough essay in the RUSI Journal on the incongruity between current British defense discourse and the threat posed by radical Islam.[1]

 


Dissident Watch: Mohsen Marzouk

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - June 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments When Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali extended his term in 2004 for another five years, making him effectively president-for-life, Mohsen Marzouk realized that for change to occur not only in Tunisia but also in other North African police states, it would be necessary to mesh internal Tunisian networks with ideas and activists from outside the country. Born in July 1965 and raised in a poor, working-class neighborhood in Sfax, Marzouk has long been politically active.

 


Correspondence: How Violent Is Iraqi Culture?

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - June 1, 2008 on 10:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments To the Editor: In reading the article "Culture in Post-Saddam Iraq" by Nimrod Raphaeli (MEQ, Summer 2007), I was saddened to see that the article was so selective in its survey of Iraqi ethnography. This prompts me to surmise that the intent of the article is to demonstrate that Iraqis are essentially more violent than other cultures, rather than to discuss both sides of this debate.

 


Review of A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - March 30, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments Lukitz, a research fellow at Hebrew University's Truman Institute, weaves together a masterful biography of Gertrude Bell, one of the most controversial Western figures in Iraqi history and one of the modern Middle East's most remarkable figures. Well written with flowing narrative and richly sourced to Bell's own letters and other archival documents, A Quest in the Middle East traces Bell's life from her childhood in Northumbria to her role as Britain's second most famous Orientalist after T.E.

 


Daniel Nassif: “We Do Not Spread Propaganda for the United States”

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - March 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments Daniel Nassif is the news director of Alhurra, a U.S.-funded Arabic satellite television news network created in 2004, and has also been news director of its sister network, Radio Sawa, launched in 2002. Nassif was born in Lebanon in 1958. He immigrated to the United States in 1977 and finished his undergraduate and graduate studies in political science and public policy for international affairs at the University of Michigan in 1986.

 


Review of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - March 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments Flunking History Among many Israeli academics and Western revisionists, it has become fashionable to examine Israel's war of independence from an Arab perspective in which Jews were the aggressors and Arabs the victims.[1] This trend began in 1989 with works by Ben-Gurion University professor Benny Morris[2] and Oxford University professor Avi Shlaim,[3] and developed further with the writings of the late Hebrew University anthropologist Baruch Kimmerling,[4] Neve Gordon[5] at Ben-

 


Dissident Watch: Abdul Rahman al-Lahim

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - March 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments A Saudi court's sentence of 200 lashes and six-months' imprisonment for a 19-year-old victim of gang rape, known only as the "Qatif girl," recently made headlines across the United States. Her story would never have come to outside attention without the efforts of her lawyer, Abdul Rahman al-Lahim. A specialist in commercial law, the 36-year-old Saudi also takes human rights cases on a pro-bono basis.[1]

 


Review of World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - March 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments In World War IV, Podhoretz, a doyen of the neoconservative intellectual movement, places the struggle against Islamism in its historical context. He suggests that U.S. inaction in the face of decades of Middle Eastern terrorism served to embolden terrorists and that while 9-11 shocked U.S. policymakers and the public, it was in fact only the most sensational of a string of terrorist attacks that had seldom drawn reprisals. For George W. Bush, however, 9-

 


Review of Water Resources in Jordan: Evolving Policies for Development, the Environment, and Conflict Resolution

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - March 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments Few issues are more emotional to Middle Easterners than water, partly, because the region is so short of this vital resource. But water seems to engender strong feelings among peoples the world over. The history of the American West, for example, is full of bitter battles (both judicial and armed) over water. In the Middle East, few countries face greater threats of water shortages than does Jordan.

 


Review of The United Arab Emirates: A Study in Survival

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - March 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments The United Arab Emirates (UAE) not only has more than 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, but it is also the home to Dubai, the world's most talked about city these days. From its indoor ski slope to its 7-star hotels and the world's tallest building, Dubai defines excess. The bid of Dubai Ports World, owned by the ruling family, to buy the firm running several U.S. ports ran into a buzz saw of opposition from those worried about Dubai's reliability as a counterterrorism partner.

 


Review of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S.

Posted by Middle East Quarterly - March 1, 2008 on 11:00 am | In Middle East Forum | No Comments The trilateral relationship between Israel, Iran, and the United States is complex. Alas, Treacherous Alliance does not explain it. Based on the Johns Hopkins University doctoral thesis of Trita Parsi, best known as a Washington-based Iran lobbyist who trades on his connections to officials within the Islamic Republic, the narrative wallows in half-truths and conspiracy rather than fact. Parsi begins, for example, by stating that neoconservatives "desperately wish" for a U.S. war with Iran.

 


Next Page »