Amanda Ufheil-Somers
Amanda Ufheil-Somers was assistant editor of Middle East Report from 2011 to 2015.
Airstrikes Against the Patriarchy
The media sometimes has trouble conjuring a feel-good story out of an airstrike, but not now. In the last few days, news outlets across the world have fallen all over themselves to champion Maryam al-Mansouri [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/world/middleeast/emirates-first-female-fighter-pilot-isiThe Next Round of an Unwinnable War Beckons
Once again, a U.S. president vows to eliminate an extremist militia in the Middle East to make the region, and Americans, safe. And that means it’s time again for a reality check. Having failed in its bid to destroy the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the United States is still trying to dismaNot Much Better Than Bush
President Barack Obama got it right [http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/19/politics/obama-iraq-transcript/index.html] when he declared: "There's no military solution inside of Iraq, certainly not one that is led by the United States." But his Iraq track record doesn’t mark much of an improvement over the mModernizing Memorial Day
Whoever made the decision to open the National September 11 Memorial Museum just a few days before Memorial Day was both bold and intuitive. The theme of remembrance unites both events, but the 9/11 memorial is a departure because it is dedicated to those so often forgotten in the recollection of naA Loveless Diplomatic Marriage with No Future
Among the would-be therapists of the foreign policy world, the alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia is a textbook case of a “loveless marriage.” Though the values of the two states are at odds, or so the thinking goes, the great democracy and the absolute monarchy are bound togetherDeath and Taxes
Last year 27 cents [http://static.natprior.org/images/charts/2015/taxes-desk.png] of every income tax dollar in the United States went to the military. Even so, that proportion has not generated enough revenue to pay for the military’s operations over the last 13 years, which, in a historic departurSeeing Through the Fog
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was full of tough talk when he visited the island kingdom of Bahrain in early December. The United States, he vowed, will continue to guard “the free flow of energy and commerce” from the Persian Gulf and keep Iran nuclear-free, through the presence of 35,000 US milNew Alliances and Schisms in Sudan
The ten days of protests in Sudan beginning September 23, 2013 were the largest in the country since the installation of the military government of Omar al-Bashir in 1989. As Middle East Report editor Khalid Mustafa Medani explains in an interview with KPFA, unlike the youth-led protests of 2011 andCatastrophe in Cairo
The weak US response to the August 14 massacre of protesters in Egypt signals a preference for the Egyptian military's vision of stability over the uncertainty of a genuinely democratic political process, says Middle East Report editor Chris Toensing in a segment on Democracy Now! [http://www.democr
