Current Analysis To Stop the Killing, Deal with Asad In the wake of the recent Friends of Syria conference, the United States and Middle Eastern powers that include Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are stepping up aid to armed resistance groups in Syria. Under American leadership, the conference pledged $100 million to provide salary payments to rebel f Aziz Rana, Aslı Bâli • 3 min read
Current Analysis America's Pakistan American policymakers and their advisers are struggling with the question of Pakistan. The last ten years have produced a host of policy reviews, study group reports, congressional hearings and a few academic and more popular books, with more expected as the 2014 deadline for the end of US major com Sharon K. Weiner, Zia Mian • 21 min read
Current Analysis Despair and Continuity Actions always speak louder than words, even if words also act. Joshua Stacher • 2 min read
Current Analysis Threat Inflation via Memory Lane In 2005, Yale professor Philip Smith published a fascinating book Why War? to examine the “cultural logic” underpinning three major Middle East conflicts involving Western democracies -- the 1956 tripartite aggression in Suez, the 1991 Gulf war and the 2003 Iraq war. Smith’s thesis is that, while “hard” geopolitical Chris Toensing • 4 min read
Featured The Sudan Split On July 9, 2011, tens of thousands of South Sudanese gathered in the capital city of Juba at the mausoleum of rebel leader John Garang to celebrate the creation of their new state. Six months earlier, these jubilant crowds had voted in a referendum for independence from northern Sudan; more than 98 Mimi Kirk • 18 min read
Current Analysis War Drums and Obama For the last three weeks or so, liberal commentators have repeatedly insisted that the Obama administration bears little to no responsibility for the ever louder beating of the Iran war drums. Whatever such sounds the White House makes are just pre-election theater necessitated by Republican attacks, they say, or reflexive Chris Toensing • 4 min read
Current Analysis Strategic Commodity 201 Goodness! Look at this marxisant rubbish: Chris Toensing • 3 min read
Current Analysis Some Bad Ideas Can't Be Shot Down Some ideas are so absurd that they reveal interesting things about the times in which we live. Take, for example, an opinion piece [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/opinion/drones-for-human-rights.html?_r=1] by Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Mark Hanis in today’s New York Times suggesting that human ri Darryl Li • 3 min read
Current Analysis Slouching Toward a Hot War The odd, improbable Manssor Arbabsiar story [http://www.merip.org/mero/mero110311] is back, in prepared Congressional testimony [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/iran-is-prepared-to-launch-terrorist-attacks-in-us-intelligence-report-finds/2012/01/30/gIQACwGweQ_story.html] by Dir Chris Toensing • 2 min read
Current Analysis A Year After Tahrir In the mid-1990s, the Iraqi intellectual Isam al-Khafaji published a brace of articles lamenting the decay of “Arab thought in a dismal age.” Al-Khafaji glumly surveyed the Arab cultural scene, which, though bubbling with vitality at the edges, was dominated by the stolid priesthood of the “ultra-nationalist state.” In country Chris Toensing • 7 min read
Current Analysis Chosen People Ideology Mitchell Plitnick got [http://www.lobelog.com/gop-officially-endorses-one-state-solution/#more-11164] a Republican National Committee spokeswoman to confirm that the body passed a resolution “recognizing that Israel is neither an attacking force nor an occupier of the lands of others; and that peace Chris Toensing • 2 min read
Current Analysis A Not So Distant Mirror At the risk of stating the obvious, there are eerie and multiplying parallels between the long lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war and what passes for debate on what to do about the Iranian nuclear research program. Chris Toensing • 3 min read
